Say, how many worms are in that can?

Americans like words like Freedom and Liberty and perhaps because those ideas scare us so much. We are terrified of coercion by a government we all choose but we love to coerce those who disagree with us and deny them the right to choose.  We certainly are rarely in agreement as to what it means to be a free country and I might dare to say that question is still central to political argument today.  How do we define freedom?

• " It's a free country and I can do what I want." 
• " It's a free country and I don't have to do anything I don't want to do."

Some would equate those statements, others would point out that the first is true within limits and the second isnot, but the idea that freedom carries no obligation and indeed that in a free country it never should seems common amongst extremists.  Unfortunately extremists have a stranglehold on the Supreme Court and perhaps on Congress.  The recent decision regarding the ACA mandate that employers provide insurance coverage for contraception shows that the court sides with the second example and that when it comes to the concept of  freedom of religion and perhaps freedom of speech, personal beliefs convey personal privilege, but because this is such a limited ruling, the inherent hypocrisy becomes apparent.

If  I believe interfering with the implantation of a fertilized egg is murder, it's because of a religious interpretation of murder other people do not share and an interpretation of humanity and human rights that borders on the ludicrous. Citing a definition of freedom I do not believe the Constitution shares, the God Squad on the court allows me to opt out of  having my corporation pay for insurance that might pay for a "morning after" medication and perhaps any form of contraception. That court and indeed all courts do not provide immunity for other religious or other personal opinions and specifically not to opt our of paying for wars and executions and that is proof that one specific belief is being given special rights and others are not.  This violates the constitutional prohibition against establishment.

How will we see yesterday's ruling when other religious groups decide they don't want indirect participation in executing prisoners, bombing foreign countries and a host of other activities?  Will the court have to say this opinion is privileged and that one is not?  Haven't they just done that?  Does an aversion to contraception become an excuse to opt out of  an obligation only if  it's tied to some organized faith or is a personal dislike sufficient?  That question was answered during the years we had the draft.  It was damned hard to establish personal aversion to war without showing long term affiliation with a pacifist religion and not just a pacifist philosophy.

There can be little doubt that our government is in the business of establishing religious belief and assigning special privileges, special rights to members thereof.  There isn't a damned thing we can do seeing that the independence we make a fuss about every July was so limited.  We severed ties with the United Kingdom but not with Christianity as a force that legitimizes government and those who demand and assert the "Christian Nation"  idea are no more patriots or advocates for freedom than the Hessian troops George II hired to kill our revolutionary patriots.

It will be very hard to cite this decision as limited to the case that prompted it, and there are so many worms in that can that everyone will be able to fish for whatever special dispensation from any obligation he dislikes and our reputation for sanity, if we ever had one, won't need any bit of lead to make it sink to the bottom.

Success is failure, action is inaction.

Yes everything is Obama's fault and so the only purpose of the Republican party and all it's factions is to get rid of him by any means legal or illegal, ethical or dishonest and until they do, make it impossible for him or his party or indeed our government to function.  Rush Limbaugh's "I hope he fails" still echoes and of course everything he does or is said to have done or not done is described as a failure, a blunder, an outrage.

But whose fault is it really?  They're not a majority, but the true majority is so fractured and fractious there is little effective opposition and of course there's the ignorance factor and the stupidity factor.  How else do we account for the lack of disgusted derision directed against the all day and all night advertisements for Florida Governor Rick Scott accusing his opponent of making higher education less available while simultaneously cutting scholarship programs in half?  Does anybody care?  Isn't anybody listening to the President saying to Central American families:

“Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it.” 

If they are, why isn't anyone accusing  Louis Gohmert (R-TX) of being either insane, an America hating liar or both as he tells us Obama is " luring these children into America?" In the Republican minstrel show, you can't hear the real Obama for the shucking and jiving of the black-face Obama dancing to the Republican tune.

No, when free-market forces affect gasoline prices, it's Obama's fault, When the Shiite government Bush/Cheney installed in Iraq after destroying the country fails, it's Obama's fault and it's time to impeach him.

I have to ask myself if I really have any affection for or allegiance to this country left or whether it's just a bad habit I'm too lazy to get rid of, like leaving a bad marriage.  I have to ask myself  why I bother blogging, why I pretend it's possible to make a difference in a country hell bent on self destruction.

Never forget, never remember

Good morning Republicans and welcome to another bright new day of  washing our sins in Obama.  And haven't we been having fun preempting the Democrats from using our martial spirit, thanking every veteran for his service by damning Obama for rescuing the one and only soldier (oops, warrior ) who was treasonously disillusioned with our dear war?  Another day, another reason to impeach!

And welcome back to our neocons. Awake after their long sleep to remind us how Obama's weakness has, as we predicted, turned our faultless, perfectly arranged, positively inspiring bastion of freedom in Iraq into a flaming hell of Extremist violence. Let's greet their resurrection with a resounding chorus of  Bonzai Benghazi, Benghazi as we turn his success in capturing a perpetrator into another outrage and let's waste no time since corroboration that the attack really was a response to an Internet video works against us.

It may be another good time to toss out more chaff, more distraction: immigration, gay marriage, climate change racism and Christian rights to make sure the Libtards exhaust themselves chasing the chum while we triumph where it counts, our weapons gleaming in the bright light of a martial dawn.

For lies are the truth and truth lies and Fox is forever.  Thank you for your service. How else would we accuse the father of a war prisoner of being a Muslim terrorist or elevate a rumor to a final verdict but for Fox, the botoxed faces incapable of betraying a lie.  Chemical weapons, Biological weapons, mobile labs, nuclear weapons, centrifuges, yellow cake -- al Qaeda training camps and rape rooms: Saddam and 9/11!  not a smirk, a twitch, a tell.  No, the  America haters were wrong when they said it would be a quagmire with no end and we're right that it's now a quagmire with no end because of Obama.

The quagmire is our glory and our glory eternal, hail Bush and Cheney.  In the words of  Saint Giuliani:

President George W. Bush stood amid the fallen towers of the World Trade Center, and he said to the barbaric terrorists who attacked us, "They will hear from us." Well, they heard from us. They heard from us in Afghanistan and we removed the Taliban. They heard from us in Iraq, and we ended Saddam Hussein's reign of terror. And we put him where he belongs, in jail. They heard from us in Libya, and without firing a shot Gadhafi abandoned his weapons of mass destruction. They are hearing from us in nations that are now more reluctant to sponsor terrorists or terrorism. So long as George Bush is our president, is there any doubt they will continue to hear from us until we defeat global terrorism.

We succeeded and Obama failed and the Fox shall lie for ever and ever.  Benghazi!  NEVER FORGET, NEVER REMEMBER.

Why Benghazi doesn't matter as much as they want it to

There's a video that's making the rounds, by a guy named Bill Whittle, who is something of a tool; he's worked for conservative groups such as Pajama's Media, the National Review and Fox "News" (all of which, you might notice, are openly anti-Obama). But let's not attack the messenger - let's look at his message.


First of all, he is wrong from his opening statement. Benghazi isn't irrelevant, but it is, in fact, both trivial and a witch hunt. In his efforts to make the president look bad, he commits both the sins of omission and commission - he lies, and he ignores any facts that he finds inconvenient.

For example, Whittle tries to ignore the fact that attacks on American embassies overseas have gone on for years, by using a fascinatingly cherry-picked graphic which refers to ten attacks and sixty people dead. As Politifact has pointed out, there have been 39 attacks or attempted attacks on US embassies and embassy personnel during Bush the Younger's reign.

Of these attacks, 20 resulted in at least one death. But even if you only count attacks on embassies or consular property, you still get thirteen incidents with fatalities, not the ten he claims.

If you count fatalities from the 20 attacks, the death toll was 87 people; only if you restrict yourself to the 13 attacks on embassy personnel on embassy ground does the number of deaths drop to 66. So he was only off by 10%, right?

But that kind of margin of error is OK, in Whittle's world. Because apparently none of those deaths matter, whether they were American or not.

He makes the claim that "It is not the responsibility of the US State Department and the President of the United States to protect the lives of foreign nationals, no matter how tragic or common these attacks may be. Their job is to protect American citizens and especially Consular personnel living abroad."

That, in and of itself, is complete and utter bullshit. If a person contracts to work for the US State Department, then that person is then under the protection of the State Department, whether they are American, Iraqi, or Dutch refugees to Lichtenstein. They have agreed to work for the United States, so the United States is obligated to keep them as safe as possible.

(On top of which, it's adorable how he refers to "the responsibility of the US State Department and the President of the United States." Because the President himself should strap on a gun and personally fight the terrorists, like Harrison Ford in Air Force One. Sorry guys: just because Bush slipped into a flight suit and codpiece, he was no action hero.)

Even if Whittle is only concerned about American deaths, why is it that he only mentions one diplomat (David Foy) by name? Why doesn't he talk about Edward J. Seitz, the first State Department employee killed in Iraq? What about Jim Mollen, U.S. Embassy senior consultant? What about any of the other Americans killed?

Because they don't fit the narrative he wants to present.

Whittle presents a long and convoluted "timeline," which he apparently thinks proves that the Obama administration covered up the fact that this was a terrorist attack, and that they lied by blaming everything on an American-made online video.

What poor little Bill Whittle couldn't count on was the fact that within a week of his putting out this web-only episode of the Firewall, that same Obama administration that he hates (or more accurately, the US special forces that he masturbates over) would capture Ahmed Abu Khattala, the mastermind behind the Benghazi attack. And Abu Khattala told everyone who would listen that he had planned the attack as retaliation for that same insulting video.

It was a terrorist attack. AND it was due to the video in question. Just because you don't like facts, Mr Whittle, you don't get to ignore them. Life is more complex than you want to admit.

Incidentally, though, the special forces who captured Abu Khattala? They were working for the US military. Which, by the way, is headed by the Commander-in-Chief, President Barack Obama. If he was personally responsible for the response to the attack on Benghazi, then he is equally responsible for the capture of the terrorist Ahmed Abu Khattala. And the death of Osama Bin Laden. And untold other successful attacks on terrorists and their strongholds. You have to be consistent in these things, after all: if you're going to give him the blame when things go wrong, you also have to give him the credit when things go right.

On a side note, Whittle also wants to bring up the claim that Obama skipped the daily intelligence briefings leading up to the attack. This is a popular narrative with the Benghazi Birthers. It's based on an opinion piece published in the Washington Post, which claimed that Obama skips most of them.

Unfortunately, that's the difference between an opinion piece and an article. The WaPo fact checker eventually had to weigh in on the subject; he pointed out that Obama gets his Presidential Daily Briefing in writing every day. Bush wasn't a strong reader, so he preferred to get it in person. Every president has gotten their briefing differently: Reagan skipped his briefings 99% of the time.

(While we're on the subject, should we mention the Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001? The one that was completely ignored, entitled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US"? No. No, we shouldn't; that could be considered "using the deaths of Americans for political purposes," couldn't it?)

And finally, in his efforts to lay all of the blame for the failure in embassy security on the President, Whittle completely ignores the fact that Congress, in votes led by 100% of the congressional Republicans, voted to cut nearly $300 million dollars from the US Embassy security budget. Money that might have been used in increase their security, and could have saved the lives of all of the people killed in Benghazi.

So overall, this video ignores the facts completely, in an effort to attack the President of the United States. The only truth that we can get from this video is that Bill Whittle is a dishonest douchebag, who should be ignored by any patriotic American citizen. And by anybody with a basic grasp of logic.

L'état, c'est moi

Brent Douglass Cole has described himself as a “sovereign American Citizen attempting to thwart the obvious conspiracy and subterfuges of powers inimical to the United States.”  Yes, these Sovereign Citizen folks are few and deliberately far between but they're like an appendage of something large and pervasive and disturbing.  Cole for some reason fancies himself “a statutory Attorney General of the United States”which he'd have a hard time explaining, at least to me, since if each man is sovereign, the entire concept of a United States and a government with elected officials with any power to do anything is suspiciously self-contradictory.What he's saying is that all which makes the United States United and comprised of states is sinister and inimical to statehood and unity.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The Sovereign Mr. Cole shot a Bureau of Land Management ranger and a California Highway Patrol officer who were investigating some vehicles at a campsite. Predictably, he got shot himself although not fatally. I'm not sure why but of course when one is sovereign, one rules, by definition which makes for problems when someone else rules too and everyone is armed.  Perhaps that explains the universal and ancient need for rules that modify and limit and define sovereignty. It's why we need some form of elections or some form of ruler to replace that personal sovereignty, it being a mess if every voter votes for himself.  Short of being totally bonkers, anyone has to admit that personal sovereignty has to be strictly limited in scope and power if anyone is to survive long enough to enjoy the wild and free life of the animals.

Now of course we'd like to portray Cole as being just plain nuts, and indeed articles about him list his preoccupation with conspiracy theories most of us don't hold.  I have to defend him on that if I want to defend my own opinions and my right to have them -- and who knows?  Conspiracies abound and even wars have been started and prolonged by real, genuine conspiracies, as you may know.  No, that's not the nuts part, or at least not the dangerously nutty part: it's the notion that one is not subject to laws, that any piece of ground is mine to rule and no one else's, and all by some nebulous right that can be defended with lethal force.  Mr. Cole seems to believe that his right to declare sovereignty the way some kid might call 'dibs' makes law enforcement illegal and laws inapplicable unless he approves of them and unless he makes them.  It's the law of the jungle, in essence.  The law of  tooth and claw if you've got them and guns if you don't. It's the law of the brat and the law of the bully and a law individuals rarely enforce successfully, thank God.

Now Civilization has a price and a price that may seem excessive to some and nay well be excessive to all but doing something about it is only possible without that odd notion of  the "sovereign citizen" and the individual's right to make or ignore laws ad libidum.  A paradox, isn't it?  But in today's ultra polarized America everything we do to deal with the fringe enrages the more mainstream and the cynical Right, the Corporate Right, the Religious Right are sure to make use of it.  Cole is now a cause and another one of many and I don't know what the hell we're going to do about it.

Fox Lies, America dies

"You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" 

asked Joseph Welch of "tailgunner Joe" McCarthy, for decades the prototype for the vicious, unscrupulous and dishonest Republican Jihadist.  The unstated but nearly universally understood answer was "hell no."

McCarthy has been somewhat de-demonized after years of propaganda and  revision, but compared to what we had in 1954, at the height of the Communist witch hunt, the wealthy Corporate Political monsters now stomping on America like something from a 50's Japanese monster movie makes those little demons as pathetic as the rubber suited Godzilla compared to the thousand foot tall  computer generated version.

But is it surprising that the one thing Foxzilla has to say about the ultra radical (too radical for the al Qaeda leaders)  ISIS, now rendering all those dead and wounded and all those spent billions nugatory, is that not only is this not Bush's fault, but Bush foresaw that this would happen if we had some weak, Muslim-smelling, black Communist incompetent like Barack Obama in the White House. 

This is how America ends, not with anything but Fox.  Of course as any non-Republican -- and by Republican I mean malicious, truth-hating saboteur -- Bush signed off on the pledge to remove troops by 2012 and of course the troops wouldn't have been there but for him and his malicious lies and greed for conquest in the first place. We might not have had the Great Recession either if  he didn't lust after the title of "warpresident" he invented for himself but just like that recession that followed his war and deregulation policies, Iraq's inevitable collapse, long predicted by Bush's opponents now becomes Obama's fault and a Republican prediction.

At this point there's little left but gallows humor and bleak despair because we're all idiots, all deranged and all preoccupied with our own petty grievances:  missing airplanes, private racist comments by old men. Preoccupied by irrational fear and hog-tied by our own propaganda we just don't care enough to recall the things of only a few years ago and while we natter about like nitwits, we take step after step toward fascism and jingoism and a government of dollars, not men.

Thank you Mr. Bush

 Our efforts against Al Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere have been much like the indiscriminate use of antibiotics, killing off the weak bacteria and letting the strong get stronger.  The group they're now calling ISIS seems more radical and has more blind hatred for America and the West than the old guard and they're likely to "take back" the Iraq we set up for destruction, killing hundreds of thousands and putting control into the hands of brutal and incompetent people.There's not a hell of a lot we can do, even if  that most strange of bedfellows Iran joins forces with us, setting new records in the World Cup of irony.

As much as that idiot John McCain and that fool Tony Blair would like to re-invade, it's not likely to happen, although some wag might suggest that the only reason to suggest such a thing would be an opportunity to call Obama cowardly and weak.  They're already doing that and have been doing that since before he was elected.  But speaking of irony, hardly anyone seems, except perhaps for Fareed Zakaria, to be calling attention to the weak, cowardly and dishonest George W. Bush who lied us into invading a country, a recent ally, where Al Qaeda was not, that had nothing to do with an attack on our country and doing it with an inadequate force and a non-existent plan for what to do after the conquest.

This is nothing less than an inevitable continuation of Bush's War, a war we lost by starting it.  For those who remember the premises of that war: the nuclear program, the WMD, the connection with 9/11 and the presences of al Qaeda and its training camps within Iraq, it might be a sad thing to remember than none of those things so often repeated in such bellicose language actually turned out to be true and all of us who were called anti-American traitors, cowards and worse were actually right -- and that includes whole countries like France.  In a sane country apologies would have been made long ago, but this is not a sane or honest country, but one still trying to justify it's tragic mistakes and to blame it all on others. 

Al Qaeda, as we were warned, is now bigger, uglier, more insanely brutal and about to take over in Iraq.  Thank you Mr. Bush although you'll have to share the ignominy with Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, inter alia. This is the world you have given us along with an America too divided and self-hating to pay its bills and maintain itself.  We stay up nights listening to lies, inflated or invented scandals and hating each other for it. We install depraved religious idiots, fascists, anarchists, separatists, denialists and bigots in the legislature while slandering, libeling the president and thwarting every effort to deal with the mess the Republicans left us. Thank you for uniting Syria and Iraq under the flag of  death, for destroying any hope that this new century might be better than the old one. Thank you for bringing back the spectre of nuclear war in the middle east, for giving Iran and other nearby countries a good reason to build nukes. Thank you so much. 

Silly Saturday

OK, call it silly Saturday, but they're all the same, all silly and it's a shame.

Went to the grocery store and grabbed a package of the yogurt covered cranberries my wife likes and what do you know?  They're now Greek yogurt covered cranberries although they taste exactly the same. The revolution is over.  There's no more non-Hellenic yogurt to be had anywhere in any form.  Active, inactive, fruit on the bottom or no fruit at all, it's all Greek, all the time and forever. Another win for commercial groupspeak.  Opa!

The way we talk!  I've never heard it before but in the last few days, I'm hearing "in the wheelhouse" over and over.  Sometimes it's my wheelhouse or your wheelhouse and as far as I can tell it might mean what "in the ballpark" meant last week, or perhaps it still does -- who knows?  Not me. Anyway, my boat has a wheelhouse but I'm not in it.  Too damn hot today and  by the way God Damn it, it's not genius whatever it is - nothing is genius, it's a damned noun, not an adverb!  Is that in your twerking wheelhouse brah?


So whatever else might be trending today amongst the low word count, #instaenglish set, keep it to yourself. I've had enough, go put it in your hashtag and smoke it or shove it up your shark and jump it. I don't need a reminder of how nothing makes any sense and how much you like it that way

The End is Nigh

You don't mention the Southern Poverty Law Center down here in the South and you certainly don't want just anyone to know you're a supporter.  You'll be ostracized at best because they are on the shit list of every right wing group from top to bottom, all with their own pet hate, usually centering around that bogeyman : the United States Government.

SPLC's Hate Watch Blog had been tracking the pair of raving lunatics who murdered

two policemen, declared a revolution and killed themselves in a Las Vegas Wal-Mart.  They were part of the idiotic standoff between the Bureau of Land Management and Cliven Bundy this Spring and are fond of spewing the apocalyptic, revolutionary idiocies typical of a huge number of armed, hostile and bellicose Americans identifying themselves as "patriots."   SPLC is right to do so and too bad more attention wasn't paid to the warnings.  The as yet unnamed couple is hardly unique either in their armaments or attitudes and if the flood of e-mails I've been getting addressed to "fellow patriots" is an indicator, there are a number of them out there. A week hasn't gone by in years without a prediction of something horrible that Obama and the Liberals were about to do that fellow 'patriots' needed to be aware of.

No need to elaborate -- suffice it to say, none of their predictions have ever come true to the slightest degree, the FEMA concentration camps or the National Guard rounding up guns, although people like that will still still hang on to hope that there will be an excuse to get into the fortified bunkers and the armored vehicles and get out the big guns. I have no idea why these people chose today over yesterday or tomorrow, but perpetual predictions of that financial collapse and that gun grab would only make sense to a psychotic spoon fed hatred and lies by not only the militias and survivalist groups, but Karl Rove and Fox News and the Republican Party.

It's hard to crack down on people who haven't yet done anything and of course the above mentioned groups make it harder, portraying the subhuman hordes as heroes, but it's time we admitted we have a problem more serious than making sure no one ever says anything racist, or misogynistic or insensitive and it's time we pay attention.  History seems to be trying to repeat itself and the cast of characters is already in costume.

American Dreamin'

On this hot and steamy, Summer dreamy, hammock-sleepy Sunday.

I happened to have CNN on the other day and they were airing another one of their puff pieces on "The American Dream,"  one of those annoying reflections on how the land of opportunity is failing to be a land of opportunity.  I find it annoying because of the assumption that the USA is somehow a unique place when it comes to providing upward mobility, a more honest name for a dream that, let's face it, is everyone's dream.  I've seen figures  that argue for other countries -- quite a number of other countries -- being better places to get ahead, to get out of poverty, to save some money, to make a good life for your children, but we still call it an American Dream as we still use the word freedom to stand for some special thing we, and only we possess.

The people interviewed all seemed to believe that those Americans about to enter or having recently entered what we like to call the "work force" will not have as prosperous a life as their parents.  I remember hearing the same thing about my children's generation some 30 years ago.  If hope for the future is the American Dream, pessimism is the American affliction.  Things are always getting worse.

One young female interviewee told us her vision for the future of  people her age was bleak "because of all the guns and violence" and the answers of  the others were is bizarre and confused as hers.  It's true, the middle class of America has been shrinking for quite a while, and with a possible brief interlude, so have living standards, including health and education for all but a tiny proportion of us, but perhaps the dumbing down includes an inability to correlate the marginalization of the masses with the rise of  retro-Capitalism and the idea that we're all dependent on the very, very rich for our prosperity.  It's an idea that does I think, depend heavily on a misunderstanding of Capitalism and of prosperity.  I could easily cite Mexico or other countries with a lot of wealth in a few pairs of hands and very little opportunity that doesn't involve swimming a river or climbing a fence.

But here at home, in my unincorporated area with large spreads of trailer parks and not much more than a crossroads shopping center or two, I have to wonder just how much trickles down from a few dozen multi-multi-millionaires and billionaires who live withing walking distance from me. They don't shop here, lobby effectively to keep much commerce and traffic away and although property taxes do help our schools, most people of the white persuasion send their kids to private institutions, many of them parochial. There are very few employment opportunities even at the minimum wage.

Most of the visible trickling is the water consumption of the private water parks and golf courses owned by the sports and entertainment folks you never see, unless it's one of their helicopters going overhead.  They might as well not be here.  I can only wash my car on Thursdays and Sundays while the bulk of our drinking water nourishes grass and water slides. Trickle Trickle.  They're not really job creators other than for lawn mowing and pool maintenance.  If you find a job here, your employer would likely be a local business man.  A shop keeper, painter, mechanic, grocer -- and they are suffering still, long after the market has hit historic highs and unemployment is back in the 6% range.
It's percolating up, not trickling down and of course we understand how it all ends with no affluent consumers to fuel jobs and opportunities -- and no dream, American or otherwise, just pessimism, hopelessness.

But a good part of  the malaise has little to do with the failure of Capitalism, the growth of  monopoly, the reduction of choices and opportunities, it's also the legacy of round the clock scandal, outrage and doom marketing having so little to do with objective reality.  The 20 something has less to worry from guns and violence than I did 50 years ago, she won't be drafted, she's more likely to live a long life and not to be bankrupted by medical bills, less likely to die in a car accident and a lot of other better than nothing things, but the spirit of defeat and hopelessness is there. The habit of looking backward instead of forward of seeing defeat in victory and victory in being a loser and I have to blame the information age and the technology that lets those very, very rich prosper by providing that stream of disinformation and outrage people just can't tune out and don't know enough to question. All we lack is a Colosseum.

Before Bowe Bergdahl spoke a word to anyone, the media had already turned from hope and relief to slander and scurrilous accusation lest any unity arise.  I understand his parents have received threats and that the slime machine is at full production levels. The machine that cannot tolerate our feeling good about anything lest we tune out, unplug, wake up, fight back. 

I think it's a fine example of how dreams and hopes and even hard work are turned to shit for corporate profit:  an explanation of the success of all those apocalyptic destruction blockbuster movies and those apocalyptic shooting/suicide shootings, stabbings and bombings because we all know the end times are here and nothing is ever going to get better, unless you live on Jupiter Island Florida with a private water park and a private helicopter to fly you between your yacht and your private golf course.   These good folks aren't interested in seeing Godzilla stomp on our cities.  They are Godzilla and they've been stomping for years -- and God help anyone, from peon to president who interferes.