SAVE SHARKS, DON'T EAT COOKIES
Dr. Eugene
Narrett, Ph.D
November 23, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
Various government agencies, NGO’s and non-profits are concerned to spatter the concerned consumer (of information and ‘goods’) with useful and righteous advice daily. The human that once was a citizen is the target for instructions promising health and rectitude. Given the plethora of ‘public information’ available at ‘no charge’ (after one has purchased various cable services and the hardware that wires it into his or her brain, brain optional) it is remarkable that a pardisial millennium has not yet arrived. It can’t be long now, surely…
In a magazine pitched to the large and cumbersome demographic, “the senior citizen” (ignore them, they’ll be gone soon, they’re too expensive, etc) the editor’s monthly column sounds like the words first uttered on the moon: ‘small steps, big rewards’ and so on: what a pitch! Now that the bottom’s been knocked from the boat, the ship of state and all the little personal ‘boats’ in its ever-more massive wake, all consumers want to know how to weather the storm. “Skip the cookies.” Truly, that’s the key: it’s that simple. “The cost of health care is at the heart of the nation’s fiscal problems,”[1] it says and there may be a point here. Since Massachusetts leads the nation, once for freedom now for fascism consider that in the Bay State every year since purchasing Health Care was mandated by the State the ‘coverage’ is more expensive, -- and the penalties for not buying it get higher. So do skip the cookies; if the average slob refrains from his not-yet-rationed one oatmeal-raisin / day it will save 150 calories and that, the editor writes, will save “the 66 million people [who now] are pre-diabetic” from inflicting “$174 billion a year,” projected by some kind of United Health Care organization to total “$3.4 trillion in the decade ending 2020.”[2] Yikes: that’s almost as much as all those Bank balance sheet bail outs and executive reward printings of ‘commercial paper’ that could have been used for Charmin’. And a dollar is worth?
So stop eating cookies and get healthy. Everything’s going to hell so keep the year 2020 in mind.
Also, “pay your debts.” The editor notes that “the fastest-growing item in the federal budget today is debt service,”[3] see bailouts, above. Then he leaps from government debt to private debt, incurred in no small part because the government debt, “the party of the first part” was run up so as to impoverish Americans. So don’t spend money, don’t eat cookies; no sex (it wastes calories and since you will be fasting…) and, “Plan to work an extra year or two.” Why? “First, you’ll contribute to the Social Security trust fund.” Yes, he wrote “trust.” Also, “a delay in cashing out will bolster the Social Security fund and increase your benefit”[4] so work more years. This way, other people won’t get hired and by having more people competing for fewer jobs wages will fall enabling you to eat less, die and save money.
Wait, not to forget, #5 on the editor’s helpful list suggests that you “give Uncle Sam [Auntie Samantha] a gift” in addition to the extractions her agents already have made from your property, -- you thought it was yours: the better to take it from you, dears. “Everyone has a stake in this historic fiscal challenge” etc, etc, “to each according to his needs [as determined by “the New Idol”] from each according to his abilities,” and so on.
There was a leitmotif here: something about saving the Social Security Trust Fund. It was sort of a postscript to the column and a preemptive strike lest anyone get the right idea. Listen: “Social Security is NOT a Ponzi scheme, or even close,”[5] it’s not; it’s not. Just to prove that it’s not (remember that phrase: it’s not), the column begins with a very short bio-note on Carlo Pietro Giovanni Ponzi; the head-note refers to him as a “Master-Schemer” and the photo they use is his indictment mug-shot and profile. Isn’t this some kind of ethnic or racist profiling? Isn’t this anti-Italian defamation? Poor Ponzi: he’s not even alive to defend himself; poor President Roosevelt: he’s not even alive to read himself lionized, -- “his foresight has been vindicated…still the damn politicians can’t stop trying to tinker” with the Ponzi, rather, with Social Security. Hard as it may be to believe, “some damn politicians,” and others, “have blasted the system as wasteful and dishonest and more recently have trivialized it as little more than a Ponzi scheme.”[6] Actually, they should triple SS benefits and eliminate taxes on humans, requiring they be paid only by bankers, lawyers and government employees. That’s no Ponzi scheme: that’s justice.
Just don’t eat any cookies. Instead, try to find the parent company or owners of Defenders of Wildlife magazine whose offices are listed at 1130 17th Street, NW, in DC: 202-682-9400. Seeking the owners on the web delivered an avalanche of stories about wolves about how we all are co-owners of 449 million acres of ‘public’ [government-owned and controlled] land and that means “responsibility.” Anyhow, someone in the Fitness Center reads this gem whose nearly every article proclaims its slogan “science, not politics” at the same time that nearly every piece urges political activity by readers and asks for, um, you know, money. See, wildlife is endangered by people and their nasty products. There are not enough Beluga whales in the innermost inland portion or Cook’s inlet, a tiny spot on the vast southern shore of Alaska and the vast adjoining shore of Northwestern Canada. Also there are lots of endangered wolves and foxes and bears, and bisons and the bleeping middle class that just won’t go away, yet, after all the New Idol’s done for America with GATT, NAFTA and preferential hiring for certain groups of people. Last week the State Department forbade Canada to pipe oil from Alberta to New Orleans for refining, use and sale. Now it will try to find markets in… East Asia.[7] It’s a lot farther; getting the oil there will create a much larger CARBON FOOTPRINT, bigger that Bigfoot’s for sure but it does get the oil to China, Inc and its neighbors and keeps it from the greedy, cookie-eating Americans. Say, if you want to get a ‘wolf ring’ or other ‘Call of the Wild’ accessories just peruse this fine magazine.[8]
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The heart of this issue was the carnage being inflicted on the Pacific’s population of sharks, among the most misunderstood creatures of the earth. “Sharks get a bad rap as mindless predators.” Some are so rude as to equate them with lawyers. This despite the fact that no more than “25 people are killed by shark attacks in the United States in the past fifty years” [which seems unlikely, but who’s counting] whereas hundreds or thousands as many are killed by heart attacks or other stress-related diseases consequent upon the ministrations of the legal profession. Thing is, there are people who really like ‘shark fin soup,’ and this causes, so it is claimed, 73 million sharks a year to be maimed or killed for their fins.[9] Therefore, ergo, consequently, people in the USA should feel GUILTY for this carnage and they should PAY to do something about it (via Government regulations, fines, etc) and why, why? Because the Chinese who are the world’s largest consumers of shark fin soup do not care about the slaughter which they assiduously pursue. Therefore the New Idol, the harlot-puppets in DC must put Americans on the rack (as was done to Gibson Guitars) so that the Chinese can continue to slurp their shark soup, get our Canadian oil, take our industry until the two economies and lifestyles fuse in a nightmare metamorphosis.
The subtext of this tommy rot is that people, at least American humans, are greedy and evil and that animals, especially nasty ones like sharks and wolves and snakes, -- of which we have an ostensibly irrational fear, are good, needy, victims requiring governmental solicitude and emoluments.
How about a vision of the near future, say, “2021: the New Europe,” subtitled, “Welcome to the other United States.”[10] It’s no surprise that this regional grouping is meant to be a “United States of Europe” or that it will be dominated by Germany. Historical precedent might term this ‘the Chamberlain Plan,’ or ‘the British Plan.’ Ever since the WSJ became the flagship of News Corp it has developed an insouciant and rather cartoonish quality but this glimpse / imprimatur of the future is no joke. The map is amusing; it’s distorted to show an immense Germany stretching to the Mediterranean and, by the color code, including all of Italy, even more imposing than in the days of Frederick II. There’s a lighthearted air to the entire molding of ‘the public mind.’ There also is a not so light undertone. Since 20% of Italians, Spanish, Greeks and Portuguese, we’re told, will then be unemployed, and another 20% over 65 (perhaps they eschewed cookies), they will have “plenty of time to enjoy the good things in life,” like shark fin soup. On the other hand, “there are plenty of Euros to be made in this gray economy working as maids or gardeners for the Germans all of whom now have their second homes in the sunny south.”[11]
“Tomorrow belongs to me…”
The English, of course, had wisely opted out of the EU (they will never surrender the Pound at any rate) and thus become, writes the distinguished Ferguson, a Professor at Harvard, “the favored destination of Chinese direct investment in Europe.” There is a cute graphic of a Chinese ‘junk” dropping bags of $s into the North Sea. The Chinese will use their loot to purchase swank “Chelsea apartments” and “splendid Scottish shooting estates.” The “Reunited Kingdom” is a quaint place, tiny and pink, it is represented by a nerd in a blue suit (English it seems), by a leprechaun in green knickers, green jerkin, green top hat and drinking a quart, at least, of beer. The other flank is a kilted fellow in a wool vest and tam o’ shanter. Fortunately ethnic stereotypes have become taboo. There also is a “Norse League” in the USE and the central graphic is a German fellow in sun glasses raking in the coin and currencies of southeastern Europe. Plus ca change… And Switzerland is exempt from membership.
It’s cute, informative, nay, predictive, and a timely promo for a book by the Harvard Prof. It reads and scans like it was fun to write and illustrate. Yet it and the map, silly as it appears are very like the book-length description of Europe published by Siemens on their web site several years ago. Their tome, titled “Horizon 2020” described a world made better by electronic monitoring devices, so handy for the modern home, changes in employment, migrant workers, the lot. Its map was similar in that Germany was enormous, encompassing much of France and Italy. Like the WSJ article, it made clear that the new system would function by “a fiscal federalism that ensured a steady stream of funds from the north European core” to the south and east, an epitome of what the City, “the great Petrifact”[12] is doing to the developed world in general. Save the sharks! Don’t eat cookies, “let them eat cake!”
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PS: In regard to eating cake, and other substances, please do not invest any time, attention or energy in watching the ‘campaigns’ which have been a central feature of the distraction machine for decades. They are now self-parodies, shadows of shadows to use Plato’s term, with a parade of puppets being parachuted in with this or that baggage, slogans, nostrums and ‘style.’ Living people, humans with minds, cookie-eaters know that the speech-reader in chief has NOTHING to do with formulating or directing policy. S/he is a runway model that poses and reads scripts and, as the case may be, transmits lots of attitude of a certain kind. The show is transparent; the fig leaves are off and backstage is visible: the puppet show has acquired an obvious quality that tells one and all that the writers of the script and managers of the show choose to expose the threadbare charade to ‘the citizenry’ and dare them to object. It is ‘in your face’ time ™ but most people, being mostly sincere and gullible continue to entrapped and distracted by the dazzle, entranced by the shadow play on the cave’s innermost wall. This is a deadly mistake. One would do better eating cookies and shunning the games in the electronic coliseum.
Eugene Narrett blogs on literature, cultural identity & dynamics.
Eugene Narrett’s recent book Culture of Terror: The Collapse of America, on Amazon.
© 2011 Eugene Narrett - All Rights Reserved
Footnotes:
1.
Jim Toedtman, “Small Steps, Big Dividends, AARP Bulletin, Volume
52 #8, October 2011, page 5; yes, that’s his name.
2.
Ibid, emphasis added
3.
Ibid
4.
Ibid; “The New Idol” was Nietzsche’s term for the
modern State.
5.
Jim Toedtman, “The Ponzi Scheme that Isn’t,” AARP
Bulletin, Volume 52 #9, November 2011, page3
6.
Ibid
7.
Americans should read the IMF brochure “Asia 21” (as in
21st century) from the conference in Daejeon, So Korea in July 2010.
East Asia is “the model for global governance in the 21st century.”
8.
Defenders of Wildlife, Summer 2011, page 21, inter alia.
The item on Cook Inlet is page 6.
9.
Ibid 7
10.
Niall Ferguson, “2021, The New Europe,” The Wall Street
Journal, November 19-20, 2011, page C1-2
11.
Ibid C1
12.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1st Volume 1917;
two-volume edition 1922), chapters 18-22.
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