The senator’s reply: “Your present level of financial support entitles you to only this form letter acknowledging your concerns.”
Tag: government
Author’s Note: To the Least of These
Today, cuts take effect that slash the amount of help more than 47 million needy Americans receive in nutritional assistance each month. The Congress, in its finite wisdom, is debating how much more to cut: The Democrats want to cut only “some,” and the Republicans want to cut through the bone and out the other side.
This is the real-world scenario that yesterday’s story is allegory to.
I’ll leave it to you to make the connections and will say nothing further save this: If our government accurately reflects who we are as a people, then we are a heartless, amoral bunch of bastards.
Occupy: Do Not Go Gentle Into That New Year
As we bid 2011 good riddance, let’s take a few moments to gird for the battles ahead in 2012:
* It’s an election year: the president, a third of the Senate, and the whole House, plus various state governors and legislators and others. Meantime, a vocal minority is still holding our national government hostage to its revolutionary cant and its pledges to everyone but the American people.
* The assclowns who wrecked our economy are still in their high towers, still looking down on the 99%, still snapping their fingers for their pet government officials.
* The militarization of our municipal police departments proceeds apace.
* The wars on drugs, terror, immigrants, gays, women, workers, and free speech continue unabated.
I hold increasingly little hope for the American experiment our forebears set in motion, but I tend toward pessimism. We are not, in fact, preparing for a civil war, and many of our problems are perennial or even cyclical. And as one of the great book editors of our era, Marco Palmieri, tells us, “Pessimism is a misuse of imagination.”
So let’s be imaginative as we look ahead.
John Lennon said, “As soon as you react with violence, they know exactly what to do with you. Using humor and creativity in protest are the only things the establishment are not prepared to deal with.”
The establishment has gotten pretty good about using pepper spray to deal with peaceful, creative people. But we can still out-think them and bring them to heel.
Norman Lear urges us to use our creativity and our patriotism and our sense of right and wrong to stand up for the Constitution and for human decency. The country we save may be our own.
OT: Bad Planning, Bad Government, and the TSA
I would like very much to direct your attention to two posts in particular at meteorologist Mike Smith’s blog. Mr. Smith points to various naked emperors with multi-billion-dollar clothing allowances.
There are real concerns about the American way of life that are not being properly addressed while security theater provides no security, makes puppets of the masses, and enriches parasites. I don’t know about you, of course, but this annoys me (in the same sense – and for some of the same reasons – that the villagers were annoyed by Herr Doktor Frankenstein’s little experiment).
OT: Double Secret Probation
Do you fans of National Lampoon’s Animal House recall this exchange?
OT: WikiLeaks
I have just two quick things to say about WikiLeaks and its work, and this should be enough to ensure that someone in the national security bureaucracy ever after reads Catsignal (or makes Catsignal and its author suddenly disappear):
1) My parents taught me, so long ago, that if I would be ashamed if something I did or said were to become public knowledge, then the thing was shameful in the first place.
2) We are often urged to believe (contra good sense and the Fourth and Fifth amendments) that if we have done nothing wrong then we have nothing to hide. This must surely apply to the government itself as well as to its subjects.