Democracy, U.S. Release 2.0: As long as you believe you have a choice, you will stop short of rebellion. When you no longer believe you have a choice, you will be stopped short of rebellion.

Enjoy the election season; a whole lot of money is being spent for your entertainment.

In the wake of the decision by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation to withdraw funding for breast cancer screening services provided by Planed Parenthood, I have sent the following letter via e-mail to the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Planned Parenthood and the Enemy You Fight

As you undoubtedly know, a crucial component in the fight against breast cancer is early detection. Treatment, therapy, surgery, reconstruction, and long-term lifestyle management considerations are moot when the disease in its invasive form that afflicts one in eight women over the course of their lives goes undetected. Cancer, just like malevolent people and movements, prospers best when unchallenged in its nascency; and just like those malevolent people and movements, its feeding ground of victims is fertile in the ranks of the marginalized, the poor, the weak, the already injured, and the disaffected.

That the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation has of its free will and choosing elected to accommodate the wishes of those who would diminish, demean, libel, and finally end Planned Parenthood manifestly demonstrates that your organization does not understand that the disease it fights through its donations is but one face of a larger, voracious, and unfeeling predator that is enabled by people and movements whose strength and success derive from those who appease them.

I ask not that you reconsider your decision to deny financial resources to the breast cancer screening services of Planned Parenthood; instead, I petition you to reconstitute your understanding of the enemy against which you have fought so remarkably for so long. While disease is the inevitable curse of mortality, the awful scope of its enduring destruction is far too often borne of the wrongful belief that illness, harm, and death from it are separate from the societies, their values, and the choices imposed upon real, flesh-and-blood people.

I am hopeful that you will choose one day to fight breast cancer as a disease not merely of a woman's (or man's) body, but of that person in the context of our society, its values, and the choices imposed upon the real, flesh-and-blood people who need us the most.

I signed my real name to it.

You may send a message to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation through the form that has been provided by Daily Kos.

At a campaign rally in Naples, Florida, GOP candidate Rick Santorum said, "It's no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college... The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure that there wasn't one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?"

Right, Ricky. Every class lecture, I spend the entire 75 minutes pouring Leftist drivel down students' throats. I'm teaching economics and finance at the college level, indoctrinating them to the point where they grow poorly trimmed beards and wave firearms while they scream, "Death to capitalism! Death to Ludwig Von Mises! Death to credit derivative swaps, non-zero interest loans, and anything that keeps me from getting free music and movies that take ungodly amounts of money to make just so I can download them FOR FREE!"

Mr. Santorum—you pulsating stellar wind of hypocrisy, fluff, and Right-wing clichés—your bloviating disconnect is laughable. For all but one lecture, I teach hard-core, Western-style capitalism, with barely a chance to mention anything other than the standard economic models of the Classical and Keynesian schools, both of which are predicated on conservative assumptions and not-very-surprising results from those conservative assumptions (although that 18th Century prewash actually leads to some pretty uncomfortable results for Right-wing and modern "conservative" simpletons like you). Given the depth, complexity, and scope of what I need to teach this self-pitying generation of narcissistic failures of parenting and society in general—and fighting as I do a losing battle against the pop-academic airheads on the Right and the Left with their staggering truckloads of "education reform" tripe—I can pretty much promise that you would flunk my most basic finance and economics courses cold. Subsequently, or perhaps concurrently, you'd whine and bitch that I had somehow been mean and unfair to you.

Yes, Rick Santorum, thirty-plus years as a college teacher have accorded me the ability to see a flunky strutting in the door before he even makes it to his first failing grade on one of my (very traditional) tests. You look the part, and you talk the part. If you think you're something other than the poster boy for academic probation, here's the deal, sir: enroll in my one of my classes. Do it, Frat Boy, and I'll shut your pie hole before you can say, "Where do I go to drop this course?"

Do it right away. Bring cameras for plenty of photo ops. Bring your Right-wing supporters. Make it a one-semester, bigger-than-big rally. Let everyone see just how "Leftist" I am; then let them all see just how worthless your claims are, you uninformed little demagogue.

Technological innovations are a marvel to be embraced until they become the pitchfork of cultural corrosion and the tool of repressive rule posing to save us from that very corrosion.

Censorship is fine until it's censorship we don't like; then it's an outrage that simply must be stopped.

Rights are paramount until they are demanded by and then granted to things that aren't even persons.

You think PIPA (Senate 968) and SOPA (HR 3261) can be derailed? Authoritarians don't give up. Moneyed interests don't let go. Privileged people won't quit.

You think you've won, only to find out you lost because you revealed your tactics they will use against you when they come back; and come back they will, as many times, with as much stridence, capital, and force as necessary.

Sooner or later, they'll win.

In this case, those malevolent forces already have, and they have done so at our own behest: technological innovations are wonderful when they give us the means to be weak, lazy, and irresolute; censorship is fine when it's the kind we like; and constitutional rights are already being handed out to things that aren't even humans, much less citizens.

We will tire of the fight long before the authoritarians do; and when we bow ever lower to the unrelenting fist of those who know better than we, as a people we shall once again take some comfort in saying, "Melior diabolus quem scies." After all, at least we'll still have our computers, we'll never be offended by anything we see or hear on the Internet, and we'll have the wisdom and capital of corporations to help us decide who will lead our vibrant democracy away from the perilous temptations of unbridled freedom.

Salus pro licentia.

Regarding that video of U.S. soldiers urinating on killed Taliban fighters, suffer me an unapologetically harsh and decidedly disjointed rant concerning the incident, itself, and reaction to it. Specifically, I will key on Media Matters feasting on the war of words at CNN between several journalists and blow-hard commentator Dana Loesch:

"Several CNN on-air journalists are criticizing Dana Loesch's recent comments supporting the U.S. Marines who allegedly urinated on the dead bodies of Taliban forces.

"Loesch, a CNN contributor, made the comments during her radio show Thursday. Among other things, Loesch said of the incident: 'I'd drop trou and do it too.'

"Such views brought sharp criticism from some CNN on-air reporters."

I have little use for journalist cherries posing thumbs up or thumbs down on specific military actions unless the deeds rise to the level of clear crimes against individuals and groups, and by that I refer to the living. Where were all of these grunting armchair warriors when the Navy Seals shot and killed an unarmed woman who "lunged" at them after they had just shot and killed her unarmed husband, a rather famous terrorist and perfect excuse for ever-escalating denial of any supposed right to privacy? Oh, wait, the White House was wrong; she was only wounded in the leg. Fog of war, and all that. Yes, sitting there watching the whole thing in real time on multiple monitor feeds from headgear cams gets that fog really thick. Photo ops like that are way too news-worthy for circumstantial accuracy about who died and who didn't, especially when you're killing a terrorist.

Wait, she wasn't exactly "wounded." Our heroes wouldn't do that, of course. It was collateral shrapnel.

Wait, the 12-year-old daughter says her father, the late Osama bin Laden, was captured and then executed. Lying little snot, right?

Oh, that's right, those Navy Seals were heroes because it was Osama bin Laden they shot, although I can't say I saw the body, the corpse having been dumped at sea out of respect or some such facile reason. I can't say I saw the video, either. Marines, take note: it's all about spin, all about controlling the media, all about keeping those videos and photographs from getting hauled up into that fog of public opinion, informed or uninformed as it might be.

Terror Alert Level raised to Confetti for that one! Yay! Mr. Obama gets butch to shut the neocon cherries up for a few minutes. Liberals and conservatives join hands for a moment of unity in extrajudicial executions of the indicted-by-10 years-of-propaganda and their menacing wives, except that part about his wife, she wasn't killed, she was shot in the calf; no, she got some shrapnel. Did I mention that the 12-year-old girl is a little liar?

Yay, Obama. Yay, heroes. Boo, Marines who pee on dead warriors. Boo to everyone who can't keep horror videos from going viral.

Look. Urinating on killed combatants is demonstrable collapse of good order and discipline, and that happens from the top down; but, then again, let's hang the grunts just like we did with the Abu Ghraib jail keepers, and let's make sure once again that the top of the chain of command gets off the hook with their sincere lies. That way, those too-important-to-hang people might be able to serve in the Obama Administration after they've done their worst for the Bush Administration. After all, Mr. Obama wants to be respected by the big boys.

That's the same reason he'll let the Iranian nuclear weapons situation get real ugly fairly soon. We mustn't look like wimps going into the 2012 general election.

That chickenhawk Dana Loesch says she would pull her panties down and urinate on dead enemy fighters, too, just like the soldiers in that video did. Good for her. I'll just turn the other way. Seeing bloody corpses is bad enough. Watching candyass pseudo-journalists pee just might ruin my appetite.

It's almost as bad as watching what remains of the liberal apologists spinning for President Weathervane. No wonder I've lost so much weight the past few years.

No, really, everything's okay. Privacy is deeply respected, the rule of law applies equally to the rich and poor, the citizenry and the enforcers, the elite and the commoners. You are secure in your personal effects, and the courts jealously protect you in your home, as well as in your comings and goings. Your life is your own, and your ability to behave according to customs, traditions, and laws is not questioned before the fact.

Those who reveal official misconduct are received as valued watchdogs of the people.

No thing, be it an association for commerce, an agency of the government, or a position with title, carries the fundamental rights of the living who are the citizens, themselves.

Extrajudicial executions of citizens by law enforcement and military personnel are always prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and to the top of the chain of command that authored the environment in which such malicious conduct could happen.

You are essentially good, and the sovereign predicates its affairs upon the unwavering understanding that a parsimonious, circumscribed government is best when its principal objective in all of its actions is to foster that good: hypocrisy, cruelty, mendacity, and violence are never to be exemplary of us as a people because they are not exemplary of us as individuals.

The national interest is your interest simply because your interest, when it is rightful and good, is the national interest.


What I wrote above is risible satire; as such, it is sublime tragedy.

Featuring Phinnaeus, the newest cat in my family, may you all have an exciting year filled with economic prosperity and civil freedom.

Or, on the other hand, have a year like the ones we've been having.

Although I have published previous versions of my traditional last economics lecture of the semester, I am herewith sharing with you the video of the one I delivered just a few weeks ago. My teaching opportunities at the community college where I have taught for about 10 years are vanishing, in part because of the waves of powerful interests promoting "education reform," which is now overrunning communty colleges with state mandates that serve to move curriculum and assessment from the faculty to school administrators, state and federal bureaucrats, and academic publishers. All of this means that I am now swiftly becoming neither needed nor wanted as a teacher. Watch this 55-minute video in its entirety and decide for yourselves if education reform has done what is right and best.

For your holiday viewing enjoyment, here are a few of my Christmas 2011 photographs. Although all are copyright protected, only some of them have been prepared as commercial offerings for next Christmas; others I have processed just to share.













Let me know if you like any of them.

I took this photograph yesterday during a walk through a cold, barren woodland area. Even in the bitter breeze, the stillness was haunting.

About a half mile from this place, an elderly lady lives in a large house that sets at the edge of a small ravine. She and her siblings grew up in this shack that was their home on the lonely, unforgiving Prairie.

I wish I could say that I stand on the shoulders of the millions of my great, unheralded fellow countrymen who came before me, but that would be such a lie; instead, in their shadow I grovel in the self-indulgent weaknesses of modernity that are my barter of their legacy. I have no one other than myself to blame for that.

Neither have I anyone else to blame for what became of my country, where once lived the great, unheralded millions, who had not the luxury of self-indulgent weakness.

The poster above is currently being shared on facebook. Rather than taking a one-by-one approach to commenting on it—and, in so doing, giving the unintended impression that I am criticizing individuals for sharing it—I am making my response to the facebook group "Anti-Republican Crusaders" the subject of a post here at The Dark Wraith Forums. What follows is the way I would write the commentary on this poster were I to address the matter on a social network.

"...singular issues," Mr. Clooney? "...singular issues," you rich, pompous Hollywood ass?

A globally accelerating engine of hegemonic wars.

A cowardly President who cannot confront and crush Republican opposition because he really doesn't want to.

A President who sneers about the brutal detention of Bradley Manning and whose administration has prosecuted whistleblowers (unlike the Bush Administration, which did not prosecute one whistleblower).

A President who ordered the top-secret classification of photographs of our brutality in Iraq.

A President whose Byzantine complex of domestic and international enforcers is spying on and shutting down Websites, not just in the U.S., but across the world.

A President whose FDA administrators are cowering to all manner of lies the food industry wants to use so we won't know just how little our food is something like what we think it is.

A President whose mealy-mouthed attitude toward the Occupy protests only encouraged state-sponsored violence that largely killed the movement in its tracks (and, I might note in passing, a President whose DoJ has encouraged YouTube and other sites to take down videos of the violence).

A President whose Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice pretend to review the consolidation of major industries into oligopolies while letting the industrial concentration continue apace with the well-known consequences of higher prices, lower output levels, lower employment, and more concentrated corporate political money power coming at the expense of any pretense of protecting the huge advantages of fierce competition.

While I'm at it, Mr. Clooney, don't give me that line about some "400,000 jobs" your hero kept from going overseas. I'm an economist; unlike the paid and pampered economists of the liberal and conservative stripes, no one writes me a fat check, and that's why I get my predictions right. As I explained over and over again to no particular gain, U.S. Presidents Clinton and Bush coddled the Chinese as they pegged their currency at a ludicrously low value against the dollar, thereby destroying millions of American jobs and untold billions of dollars in American industrial physical capital. Clinton's less-than-geniuses did it because of old-time neo-Keynesian globalism married to neoconservative fantasies that the Chinese "free market" experiment would lead to a middle class that would demand political reforms. The subsequent Bush Administration's quite-a-bit-less-than geniuses did it because the import of artificially undervalued goods from China was matched by the American export of dollars to pay for those goods, and those American dollars in the People's Bank of China could be spent only back in the United States, where they funded our irresponsibly low tax rates, our irresponsibly unwise military adventures, and our irresponsibly high household debt-to-income ratios. Unfortunately, that Chinese pegging is now coming to an end as those years of the Chinese central bank printing ridiculous amounts of its currency to hold the peg are slowly, inexorably, and destructively turning into systemic inflation that the Chinese rulers cannot pretend isn't there because the global currency markets are making it quite clear that the peg has to come off, and those Chinese communists can't just lie about it anymore. The same is or will be happening all over the world to the nations we coddled by letting them peg their currencies. So, yes, jobs are coming home, but all that means is that old-time economics is finally putting its teeth into another system of New Age myths.

Now, let me get back to the main point I intend to make in this article, Mr. Clooney. You and your fancy income and high profile respectability can go straight to Hell. You're just another Institutional Left shill, and you're nothing but the mirror of the Institutional Right shills who apologized for Bush and his gang. You're dumb about economics, and you're irreparably lost in your self-importance fanned by the mainstream media, which magnifies the approved messages of the phony outrage of political opponents, neither of whose spokespeople have even the slightest clue about what it means to want for food, shelter, gainful and certain employment, and a little dignity. That last one, by the way, might mean your hero President's Executive Branch would have to take down its incomprehensibly huge busy-body cybernetwork that does everything from deploy malware in almost everyone's computer to run a whole industry of perverts who technologically strip naked anyone who wants to board an airplane.

"Hope and Change"?

Hope, sure; we're talking about marketing.

Change, absolutely not; we're talking about Empire.

Mr. Clooney, take your fancy income, your nice houses, your surety about your future, and your friends in high places, and you just go ahead and live your comfortable life, but do so somewhere other than in my face or even where I can hear your bleat. That goes for Warren Buffet, George Soros, and all the other fancy men and women who think Barack Obama and the failed neoliberal agenda are just what I need.

I'll go my own way, and you go yours; but know this, Mr. Clooney: history is not "about" conflict; history is conflict. Put on your nice suit, white shirt, and expensive tie; you should look good when history comes to visit.

The future will come quickly, now. It will not be apocalyptic, not for most people, at least; but it will be obvious that where we are is not as good as where we were. Part of that feeling is the old story of a better time, a Garden we know was there because we were there, whether or not we really were; another part of that sense, however, is quite a bit less fanciful.

I fondly remember the nights when I was a child—a thin, active, outgoing little boy—when my parents would take me places. It was so good, especially on a cold night, when I would sit in the back seat of our big yellow Chevy Impala, all warm and enthralled in the sights of the countryside in the darkness.

We would travel the long, lonely roads of the rural Midwest of that era, and I could look out into the blackness of the night through the side windows. Occasionally, I'd see the light from a mercury vapor lamp off in the distance. That meant someone lived way back there. It was probably a family. They had a light, so that meant everything was okay, just like it was for me in that big back seat, where I could lie down when I got sleepy.

Every once in a great while, we would come to an overpass. That was exciting since it was about the only place where big lights illuminated the whole road. Better still, there would usually be at least one, maybe two, all-night diners. When I'd feel the car slowing down, I knew that meant we were going to stop at one of those restaurants, where it would be bright, music might be playing, and I'd get to have a cheeseburger and a vanilla milk shake. Usually, there'd be some kind of a little shop where I could see some really cool stuff, and I'd be able to watch people I didn't know.

Mom and Dad would chat with each other, and the waitress would talk to all of us, including me.

When we'd finish eating, Dad would get ready to pay the bill, and I'd hurry outside, where I could stand in the lights of the parking lot and experience things I really liked. On a cold night, it was especially great because even my skin would have something to do as it tingled in the frosty night air. I could smell the diesel fumes from trucks pulling into and out of the parking lot, and I could hear the semi truck tires howling away on the big interstate that went under the overpass.

The lights from the restaurant and the parking lot were so bright that I could see in the night.

Mom and Dad would come out. Dad would be stuffing his wallet back in his pants while Mom would be chattering away. We'd go to the car, but I'd always take one last deep breath of the night before I'd climb in. Back on the road, I'd try to look out the car windows for a while, but weariness from the good meal would inevitably, and pretty quickly, set in, and I'd lie down on that big back seat, where I'd fall asleep, safe and warm.

It wouldn't be too many years later that Dad would get sick and die from lung cancer our doctor too long told him was just pleurisy. Blue Shield cut off paying for the horrible chemotherapy and Betatron treatments long before the doctors gave up trying to make the cancer go away.

The Sunday afternoon Dad died, I left the room when Dad, in his last moments, asked my eldest brother to lift him up so he could see the towering pine tree outside the second-story bedroom window.

I went to the back yard, where I sat down behind a big old maple tree. Mom didn't see me when she came out to watch the sun set and maybe to see if Dad's soul was safely on its way. I heard her quietly say his name, then she went back inside.

I didn't understand on a deep level why we had to move from that nice, big house, and why we'd end up sleeping in the old station wagon that replaced the Impala.

I didn't understand on a deep level why I became more and more isolated and disliked by just about everyone at school. I withdrew. I didn't think about it; I didn't consciously decide to; I just did. By the time I was in my early teens, I sat in a corner of the run-down apartment we got. I surrounded myself with stacks of boxes and books. Those were my things, and they were all I had, except for Mom, and she was prone to acting pretty loud and crazy. She'd still put herself together and turn into a sharp, fiece lioness when she needed to, but she really acted strange far too often, and that made me withdraw even more.

Dad and Mom had managed a loan company for the wealthy local owners, and he'd been covering increasingly bad problems the company was having with payments. Mom kept it going as long as she could until those wealthy people threw her out one day because she couldn't make the dividend and coupon payments they were expecting. She blamed Dad and all the cronies to whom he'd made bad loans, including my eldest brother's customers at a boat shop he owned by the lake. I knew she was right about all that, but what I didn't know was that Dad had been forestalling economic disaster in a tiny company that was a meaningless bit player in a global drama of shifting financial, monetary, and power paradigms. I would realize that much, much later in my life; but at the time, all I knew was that I needed to wear a big overcoat whenever I was outside because that was the way the world couldn't touch me. (See my story, "The end of all things.") No one knew what to do about me. A few were bold enough to tell me to lay off the self-pity and grow up (as if that or the occasional threats of violence were going to straighten me up), but most others just sort of left me alone, some of them imagining that I would grow out of my crash into self-absorbed oblivion, which I did when my Mom and I took up residence in an abandoned farm house. I learned to clear fields, kill food, and generally feel good about losing weight and gaining muscles through hard, sweaty work.

Eventually, we had to move from there. One night later on, Mom dropped to the floor in a coma at the all-night diner where she worked. She'd been holding back the progressive ravages of diabetes for too long, and it finally got her good. By the time she came back, she was pretty much blind from retinopathy, in pain and constantly trembling from neuropathy, and in even worse debt from the new medical bills that were now piled on the bills we hadn't gotten paid off from Dad's time. After she collected Social Security Disability payments and some food stamps for a while, she got word that the government had decided she could be retrained for gainful employment, so she got sent to a place where blind people learn how to do things. They cut off most of her food stamps and reduced her disability checks.

For her, it was just about the end of the world because retirement benefits were still a few years away. What she didn't know, and probably wouldn't have cared about, anyway, was that another wave in those shifting paradigms of global finance, money, and power was sweeping through the land, once again culling the populace of its weak and infirmed, along with the old memories of a better time those kind might carry with particular clarity.

Under mounting pressures for my lack of a plan for my life, having quit high school and having failed at college, I enlisted in the Army. That was an awful mistake and a fine platform for starting over (see my story, "I Am Become Battle, How White Be My Tears").

Times were good when I got back to college and soon thereafter became a college teacher. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I imagined that everything would get better from year to year, and it did for a good run. I hadn't learned the lesson of my youth, though: the waves of that shifting economic reality would return, one after the other, through my life, which would be nothing but one more tiny piece of driftwood in a roiling ocean of kindling from little trees of personal hopes lifted up and thrown to the currents like meaningless toys in a vast drama. The scope and meaning of that large play would not be appreciated for many decades to come, even by those with nominal control over events on the ground.

The robust economic growth of the 1990s was the staging platform for a hard shift into the 21st Century, and all of what seemed like willful and terrible acts were random but precisely understandable set props in the larger, heaving, pushing tide of history in constant birth. The near-catastrophe that swept through the global financial system in 2008 was symptomatic of an unstoppable force pulling economic life for the world's peoples into a gruesome maw of new and complex relationships between sovereign states and the far more efficient generators of innovation and attendant revenue of large corporations.


If you think the grim future can be stopped with protests, elections, wishful thinking, and apocalyptic articles whipping your political cohorts to action, you haven't been where I lived, and you haven't looked at the young people today, so many of whom are acting eerily like I did two generations ago at the shock front of the new world that was to sweep away the strength and success of the post-World War II era. The shadows of the darkening landscape are lengthening right before our eyes, and before long, they will merge into the seemingly bottomless well of night. All those kids—the emos, the goths, the juggalo trash, the semi-literates, the losers, the TV and music-addicted wastlings, the failures of the education system, the ones who can't compete academically against kids from just about any other country on Earth? Those are the ghosts of our future. That ought to scare the Hell out of you, especially considering that we made them. In so doing, we really did make the future, notwithstanding all those shifting global paradigms flogging us with the demoralizing whip of our own irrelevence.

Imagine, if you choose, that you can stop that future. That's not the worst lie you can tell yourself, but it's still a lie if you think stopping the future means stopping someone else who's to blame for how bad it's going to be. Times will not get better just because we want them to or just because men and women who pose to be our leaders promise they will if only we'll crawl to their special signature brand of conservative or neoliberal authoritarianism.

In the end, I was the creator of my own destiny. Wallowing in self-pity postponed the time when, instead of hiding from the world or, far worse, trying as a self-loathing narcissist to confront its awful monsters, I had to take on the miserable task of fixing the mess that was myself. I'm still working on it. Some days are better than others.

We, like the world, all have a whole lot of good as we careen out of control into the bad times ahead. We have already waited way too long to seize our own day and, in so doing, we have made the task of taming that angry, destructive unknown all the more difficult and unlikely. We should try, anyway.

I explain it to my students like this:

The sunset of Empire is behind us. No one—not you, not I, not we—can return the sun to the warmth of day; we must, instead, go into the night. You can walk in darkness and expect someone to hold a torch for you, or you can carry your own torch. By either of these two means, you might survive the long night ahead; but know this: you have a third way. Instead of following the torch or carrying the torch, you can be the torch—the very light, itself—on your path through the darkness. If you choose this way, in time you will learn the most important lesson of all as you journey through the night searching for the morning. Not only were you the night as you let the fall of Empire consume you in darkness, but when you chose to be the torch in the darkness, you became the morning.


Powerless, yet still we created the dark future we must now survive.

Imagine the morning of the future if we choose to be powerless no longer.