Death Of The Duck

Mommar Quadaffi Dead


Al Arabya is reporting that Mommar Quaddafi, whom we've always referred to here as Quaddafi Duck, murderous repressive sociopath (and winner of the "Most Bizarrely-Dressed World Leader" award for twenty years running), has been reported dead in his home town of Sirte, Libya, where he had retreated when all but a few die-hard retainers feld for the safety of the West, leaving the Duck to die in the Führerbunker -- whoops; sorry. Got my historical despots confused for a moment.

Sirte had been surrounded and pummeled by forces of the new Libyan government for weeks, finally coming down to one, single neighborhood which wouldn't surrender. Early this morning (PDST) in Sirte, The Duck and a small group of soldiers attempted to break out of the neighborhood and in the ensuing firefight Quaddafi was killed.

Someone on the scene took a short cellphone video of the crowd surrounding and dragging The Duck's body. Al-Jazeera was showing it unedited in the beginning, then began showing it with Quaddafi's body blurred until it reached a single frame (shown below) where he could be recognized.

Also, it must have been taken almost immediately after the gun battle and his death; in the video, Quaddafi's arm and hand fall back as he was being rolled over, without any apparent stiffness in finger or wrist joints: Rigor begins to set in almost immediately after death, and it begins in the extremities.


AlJazeera Shows Cell Phone Video Of Crowd Defiling The Duck, Mussolini-Style
(Screenshot: Al-Jazeera online)

The Duck is dead. And thousands of shoulder-launched missiles (things which can easily be used against, well, airliners, for god's sake) and other weapons have fallen into the hands of Nobody Knows Who. The possible blowback from Quaddafi's fall and exit is anyone's guess.

There is, however, much rejoicing in Tripoli and elsewhere in Libya, and in the Arab world, at the End Of The Duck. The Libyan people endured decades of repression and bizarre costumes -- so, for a while, no one should harsh the Buzz that comes from the collapse of a dictator and the end of a long season of fear.

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MEHR: Additional videos of The Duck's final moments have surfaced.

As a former law-enforcement-related Dog, seeing anyone killed by a mob without benefit of Due Process is repugnant, no matter how much I may understand the emotions behind it. As a human being, seeing any kind of violence happen, at all, disturbs me. The videos are visceral, brief, but manifestly ugly on a very profound level.

The leader deserved a trial; the man deserved just enough cold, common politeness to get him into a jail cell. Well... Sow the Wind; Reap the Whirlwind. You can do anything in this life you want -- absolutely anything; so long as you understand this: You have to pull whatever freight comes with it.

I think The Duck (like so many of us do, with relatively less serious consequences), had convinced himself that he was somehow immune from that.

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Yes, Virginia; Something Is Different

We'll See About This

A not-very-well-considered change to the Blog. I'm Iffy with it.

Since no one really reads this, I'm guessing it doesn't matter.

Let's see how long it lasts.

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MEHR: Well, Before Nine is more or less back to normal. I'd decided to 'play around' with the so-called 'Template Designer' provided by the Don't-Be-Evil-But-We-Are-Anyway crowd.

Not only did I succeed in screwing everything up (I put it down to Canine Error), but then discovered Google-Blogger doesn't really want you to go back to what you had before. It does not make the design-it-yourself experience easy 'n fun for the Dino Dog set.

Anyway; back to Norbal. I want my chew toy.

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Any Questions?

Yes, This Will Be On The Final


(Via Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture )

MEHR: As a counterpoint to the effective destruction of the United States at the hands of one, specific political party -- here, a review of media coverage of the major avowed candidates for President in the 2012 elections (P.S.; All but one is a Rethug) by the Pew Center:



"Liberal Media". Be sure and tell that one to Little Rupert. He'll soil himself laughing -- which, given his age, might not be that hard to do under normal circumstances, anyway.

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Education

Fear Not; Four Of These Will Still Buy A Cup Of Coffee;
Ten Thousand (Or Less) Will Buy You A Congressman



Take a look at Occupy George: Art For Education's Sake.

Heh. Perhaps this will inspire you enough to find your own way to say We Are The 99%.

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#OccupyEverywhere

Justice Is Coming


#Occupy Demonstrators In Times Square, New York City
October 15, 2011 (Photo: © 2011 John De Guzman)

They say it’s because you’re lazy. They say it’s because you make poor choices. They say it’s because you’re spoiled. If you’d only apply yourself a little more, worked a little harder, planned a little better, things would go well for you. Why do you need more help? Haven’t they helped you enough? They say you have no one to blame but yourself. They say it’s all your fault.
-- We are the 99 Percent, the Tumblr Of #Occupy

Mother Jones online has an interactive map of the growing international scope of the #Occupy protests. They also have a timeline of the development of the actions since they began in New York City on September 17th, along with charts and links to additional information.


(Click To View Larger Map. It's Easy And Fun!)

However, as most already know, The Revolution Will Be Digitized and is primarily taking place in Tweetspace -- where, unfortunately, Big Brother can listen in and run analytics on them just as well as Twitter can.

MEHR:

This is Why They Hate You and Want You to Die
By Josh Brown (The Reformed Broker)

You want to know why everyone in this country hates you and wants you dead, you big stupid fucking bank?

Here's why, pay attention:

(Reuters) – Bank of America Corp will pay $11 million to ousted executives Joe Price and Sallie Krawcheck, a large payout at a time when banks face protests over pay but smaller than the eight-figure packages some executives received before the financial crisis...

Elevenmilliondollars? What the hell world are you inhabiting? Eleven million dollars for two departing executives because things didn't work out?...

It's not that this isn't your prerogative as a private company - it is. But ...almost like you're making these payments to get a reaction out people.

...when thousands of people are massing in every major city in the country to make the case that you don't deserve to exist... when you're being investigated for employing robo-signers just to maintain a certain level of foreclosures processed per month. At a time when you're laying off rank-and-file employees not by the hundreds, not by the thousands - but in the tens of thousands.

At a time when retired seniors, desperately seeking income, have been pushed into annuities, life settlements, commodities and junk bonds because of the zero percent interest rate policy that was meant to nurse you and your balance sheet back to health - and this is what you do with their money? With OUR money?

Are you crazy?

You pay fired executives more in severance than the average American worker will earn in a lifetime. For most people on the outside looking in, this seems like it's from outer space, another world entirely. These numbers just do not exist to regular human beings, they cannot be fathomed.

The ordinary American is not a class warrior or a woe-is-me whiner coveting the rewards of others - the ordinary American simply believes that extraordinary rewards should go to those who do extraordinary things, not to paper-pushing failures at parasite banks.

So let me give you a hint... This is why they hate you. This very type of thing, while just a single example, epitomizes the piggish mentality that has set you apart from everyone else. This is why they're marching against you and calling for boycotts and writing their politicians. And this is why your whole model and way of life is on its way to being dead. Forever.

...You blew the second chance you got with TARP to re-enter society as a productive component of commerce. You went back to bonus-swilling, full-retard mode as though nothing ever happened and 13 million people weren't sitting around in their post credit-bubble joblessness for three years now.

...You've managed to awaken one of the most indolent, lethargic and apathetic populaces in the history of the world... a slumbering nation of 300 million from it's Entennman's and Zoloft-induced stupor. America is awake now and it's pissed.

Good luck with that.

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Part Of The One Per Cent? Rich? Bored?

Once Only The Concern Of Porn Stars



If you're a woman, I'd like you to think, for just a moment, about the spectrum of challenges that the human species, male and female, currently faces -- ecological, economic; cultural and political. Think hard. Think about all the various requests for financial support that have moved you to give money this past year.

Now; instead of these concerns, think about focusing on this (as reported in the Guardian UK). Think about spending thousands of dollars and a significant amount of personal discomfort -- on buying a new vagina. Because someone (not you) thinks you should.

...This newish industry consists of doctors and their clients (clients, not patients, because these surgeries are cash-only elective procedures) who believe the female nether area can be improved upon or remediated. Procedures offered include labiaplasty (trimming or completely removing labia), vaginal rejuvenation (tightening), hymenoplasty ("revirgination") and clitoral "unhooding" – among others.

...Designer vagina surgery is big business: according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, in 2009 female consumers spent an estimated $6.8m (£4.4m) on these procedures (the figure counts only plastic surgeons, not gynecologists). Its popularity is rising in the UK, too – in 2008, the NHS carried out 1,118 labiaplasty operations, an increase of 70% on the previous year. And figures released this year show that plastic surgery company the Harley Medical Group received more than 5,000 inquiries about cosmetic gynecology in 2010, 65% of them for labial reduction, the rest for tightening and reshaping.


You Must Work Hard To Keep Your Man; What Else Is There?

...In the US, cosmetic gynecology may have the official sanction of reality TV (doctors have performed it on the wildly popular plastic surgery makeover show "Dr. 90210") but the same cannot be said of the peer organizations.

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) deems such procedures medically unnecessary, possibly unsafe, and is "concerned with the ethical issues"; while the accrediting body, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ABOG), refuses to recognize cosmetic [gynecology] as a legitimate sub-speciality.

This means no entry barriers for the physicians, as there are no board-certification requirements. Consumers may not realize that it's a bit of a wild west out there, with doctors working out the kinks, as it were, as they go.

Try and save the Polar Bears; work to rein in Wall Street. Send your money to Progressive politicians -- or, have your already perfect privates remade in an image dreamt up by obese right-wing polticos or producers of fuck movies (there's little difference between the two; trust me), or Type-A, "I'm A Job-Creator" husbands who will leave you for Trophy Wife No. 2 anyway.

Your choice.

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"We Shouldn't Bail Out Banks. We Should Bail Out people."

#Occupy Europa Und Die Welt


Demonstrations In Berlin Against The World Financial Structure

The NYT this morning:

In dozens of cities around the world on Saturday, people took to the streets, clutching placards and chanting slogans as part of a planned day of protests against the financial system.

In Rome, a protest thick with tension spread over several miles. Protesters set fire to at least one building and clashed violently with the police, who responded with water cannons and tear gas.

In other European cities, including Berlin and London, the demonstrations were largely peaceful, with thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and many gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Elsewhere, the turnout was more modest, but rallies of a few hundred people were held in several cities, including Sydney, Australia, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Protests were also held in New York and several other cities in the United States and Canada...

...Despite the difference in language, landscape and scale, the protests were united in frustration with the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

“I have no problem with capitalism. I have no problem with a market economy. But I find the way the financial system is functioning deeply unethical,” Herbert Haberl, 51, said in Berlin. “We shouldn’t bail out the banks. We should bail out the people.”

Another protester in Berlin, Katja Simke, 31, said that it was clear “that something has to be done... This isn’t a single movement but a network of different groups”...

Saturday’s protests sprang from demonstrations in Spain in May and the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that began last month in New York. This weekend, the global show of force came as finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations meet in Paris to discuss global economic issues, including ways to tackle Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.

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Silvio !!! Chapter MCMXXXXXLVII: The State Is ME!

Government By Commedia del Arte


Silvio! Salutes -- Himself, Of Course

To me -- and I don't think I'm alone -- one hallmark of These Days™ we're living through is the slow, steady erosion of things based on illusion, and lies.

The financial Bubble was spun out of caviar wishes and champagne dreams; it was a manipulation of each stage of the process from real estate sales to loan origination to the packaging of CDOs and pushing them on investors, by rentiers -- persons who

play no productive role in the economy themselves but who monopolize the access to physical assets, financial assets and technologies. They make money not from producing anything new themselves, but purely from [possession] of property (which provides a claim to a revenue stream)... (Wikipedia).

For the past three years, for some, this has become clearer. To other people, that same dawning clarity is threatening on a visceral level, an aberration.

This has been a global game, and in Europe, the results are the same -- political, corporate and financial illusions are beginning to come apart like the legendary cheap suit. And nowhere has the Illusory State been more pronounced than Italy, where a working Center-Right coalition in its Parliament has given the country its longest-lasting, most stable government in fifty years.

However, "stable" is a relative term. Silvio !'s government has been marred by accusations of corruption (expected in Italy, which has been a Kleptocracy on some level for centuries) and mismanagement, which Berlusconi's coalition was supposed to change.

Unfortunately, that coalition was brokered by a narcissistic Oligarch, pompous and vainglorious -- the Latin version of Sad Vlad The Putin: Silvio!

And unfortunately for Little Silvio, after besting his detractors and enemies and remaining the Prime Minister of that near-failed state, now the world's financial crisis is coming home -- to live with his people.

Not Silvio -- he's a bunga-bunga billionaire; personally, he'll be very comfortable. The Italian people? Not so much. And that could spell the end for Little Silvio's reign as the Clown Prince Of the European Union.

From today's New York Times:

In his narrowest escape yet, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi barely survived a confidence vote on Friday, saving his government from collapse but leaving it all but incapable of legislating effectively.

With 316 votes for and 301 votes against, Mr. Berlusconi’s center-right coalition won the vote. But it failed to secure a solid majority, making it increasingly difficult for him to pass legislation aimed at protecting Italy from Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Had he lost, Mr. Berlusconi would have had to resign, marking the end of an 18-year political era in which the billionaire businessman shaped Italian politics in his own image, entwining the country’s fate with his own.

...the Berlusconi government was now hanging by a thread and could fall at the next bump in the road — when enough disgruntled lawmakers from within Mr. Berlusconi’s coalition calculate that they would be safer jumping off a sinking ship rather than staying aboard and risking drowning...

Since 2009, the European debt crisis has felled governments in Ireland, Portugal and Slovakia, led to early elections in Spain and a cabinet reshuffle in Greece. So far, Mr. Berlusconi has proven to be a tough outlier — not least because the European Central Bank in August agreed to buy Italian debt. But the bank did this in exchange for promised structural changes that the government has not yet carried out, a mix of tax increases and changes to the pension system...

This week, opposition leaders — and the president of Italy, in an unusually strong statement — told Mr. Berlusconi that surviving a confidence vote was not the same as governing... the center-left opposition has repeatedly called on Mr. Berlusconi to step down.. [and] repeatedly accused Mr. Berlusconi of buying the votes of would-be dissidents within his own center-right coalition.

On Friday, Mr. Berlusconi was saved by loyalists who prefer to have the government limp along rather than fall and potentially be replaced by a group of nonpolitical technocrats with a mandate to carry out the structural changes including tax increases, changes to the pension system and a growth stimulus bill now deadlocked in Parliament.

Foreign investors and many of Italy’s business leaders hope for such a technical government, but lawmakers have resisted out of fears of losing power.

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A Reprint: Art Clokey, Father Of Gumby: 1921 - 2010

So Long Until Next Time: Art Clokey (1921-2010)
(Photo: © Premavision)

Art Clokey, the animator / inventor responsible for creating Gumby, and sparking an entire stop-motion animation industry, passed away last night at age 88.

I didn't pay a great deal of attention to the Gumby cartoon series as a child. I did watch, and owned a rubberized, pliable Gumby™ figurine when they were sold in the 1960's, but Gumby (and his sidekick, Pokey the horse) didn't attract me the way classically-animated cartoons did.


Clokey Working On Gumby Goes To The Moon, 1956
(Photo: © Premavision)

In part, this was because it looked too much like what it was: Stop-motion animation. The Classic, Hollywood animated cartoons created cel by cel (Warner Brothers' Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes; Bob Clampett's or Tex Avery's work) for me were fluid, even graceful, chaos by comparison.

The Road Runner and Wyle E. Coyote or Bugs and Daffy presented things that weren't possible in reality -- which is what happens in a child's imagination. Gumby and Pokey seemed too much like what I would see playing with toy soldiers or cars in the back yard of my family's home.

It took a different kind of imagination to appreciate both the artistry in the stop-motion medium, and see Clokey's work in a different light. I loved the Wallace and Grommitt films -- painstakingly crafted, amazingly creative, and funny -- along with Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, or James and the Giant Peach; Corpse Bride; and the recent film 9.

Burton's work, even Thomas The Tank Engine (not quite stop-motion) and the ubiquitous Mister Bill of SNL, might not have been realized without Clokey's imaginative adventures of Gumby and Pokey, Nopey, and the Blockheads.


"I'm Gumby, Damnit" (Saturday Night Live)


Jack Thinks About ExMass (Burton's Nightmare)


The Classic Wallace and Grommitt

n 1955, a pupil of legendary animator Slavko Vorkapich produced a short claymation student film at the University of Southern California. The pupil was Art Clokey; his short film was Gumbasia (based on Disney's 1940 Fantasia), a Claymation, stop-motion animation starring a simple and oddly-shaped character formed out of green, plasticine clay, invented by Clokey and his wife, Ruth.

Ruth suggested to her husband that his film's character should be simple, based on the Gingerbread man -- and green, simply because it was Clokey's favorite color. Gumby's legs and feet were made wide to ensure the clay character would stand up during stop-motion filming, and the slanted shape of Gumby's head -- instantly recognizable, now -- was based on a hair style Clokey's father sported in an old family photograph.


Gumby And Pokey During The Classic TV Years.

Clokey's student film, and several subsequent short 'test cartoons', were well-regarded enough that they were shown during NBC's extremely popular children's program, The Howdy Doody Show, for test reactions from studio and viewing audiences in 1956. The first animation, "Gumby Goes To The Moon", didn't impress NBC executives; however, Clokey's second work, "Robot Rumpus", won them over, and Clokey signed a deal with NBC in 1957 for the first Gumby show.



The original Gumby Show only lasted for two years at NBC, but afterwards Clokey continued trying to bring his characters back to the small screen. He succeeded in 1961, and Clokey's production company created episodes of Gumby for the next seven years. Even after production officially ceased in 1968, these classic Gumby episodes were rebroadcast on local stations in America for decades.



After a long hiatus, Clokey and his production company entered into another contract with Lorimar Telepictures in 1988 to revive Gumby in new episodes with additional characters, which lasted into the mid-1990's. In 1997, Clokey's production group released "Gumby, The Movie".


2009 Advertisement For Clokey Documentary

Clokey fell into relative obscurity, and some financial difficulty (why America does this to its artists when other cultures don't is saddening and disheartening). It's good that people like Tim Burton acknowledge the debt they owe to Clokey's imagination and work. Clokey never stopped being his own foremost advocate, until old age and declining health forced him to depend on his son, Joe, to carry on his animation legacy.

Fortunately, there is a public who remembers and values Clokey's contribution; they remember Gumby and Pokey as part of the furniture of their imagination as children. In the past five years, there were retrospectives of Clokey's work in New York and San Francisco; a documentary film, Gumby Dharma, was made about him and released in 2006. His son continues to push to bring Gumby and Pokey back to television for new generations of children; and Clokey lived to see digitally-remastered DVD versions of his television episodes completed.

Anything which adds gentleness and laughter, particularly for children, in this world is an absolute good -- so I hope he's successful.

Thanks, Art.

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"We Need A New System"

If they cannot address [the sovereign debt crisis in Europe] in a credible way, I believe within perhaps two to three weeks, we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system.

We're not just talking about a relatively small Belgian bank, we're talking about the largest banks in the world. The largest banks in Germany, the largest banks in France that will spread to the UK in part through the sovereign debt problems in Ireland.

It will spread everywhere because the global financial system is so interconnected, all those banks are counterparties to every significant bank in the US and in Britain, and in Japan and around the world. This would be a crisis, in my view, more serious than the crisis in 2008.

-- Dr. Robert Shapiro, economic advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama, now the IMF; on the BBC's 'Newsnight', October 5, 2011

At Media Matters, Ari Rabin-Havt recently posted an article entitled , "We Need A New System", which began with recounting a friend's arrival in Washington, D.C., eleven years ago, at the height of protests at a scheduled meeting of the World Bank.

From the back seat of a taxi, Rabin-Havt's friend saw one of the protestors, a woman, wearing a T-Shirt with the slogan We Need A New System! -- and the friend just happened to attend a dinner party that night, with " 'ambassadors, politicians, esteemed professors and what seemed like the entire combined senior economist staff of the IMF, World Bank and Treasury' ", including Larry Summers.

The friend recounted seeing the woman protesting the World Bank meeting; it turned out Summers had seen her, too -- he'd even spoken with her.

And so I asked the girl [Summers recounted to the other guests]: 'What is this new system that you want? Tell me about it!' And the girl had nothing. Nothing! She had no fucking clue what this magical new system was supposed to be. No one is saying that there aren't problems with the world economy the way it is today. But these kids out there -- they don't know what they want!

Rabin-Havt's friend then said to Summers, "You've got 50 economics PhDs in this room who pretty much run the world economy. And you're asking that girl for a better system? Aren't the solutions your job? You admit billions are living in hell, but it's up to that girl to fix it?"

Summers, working on getting a third set of jowls, chuckled and moved on.

Rabin-Havt continued:

Over the last twenty five days across the media -- with several notable exceptions -- we've seen elites point fingers, chuckle and play punch the hippy while covering the Occupy Wall Street protests. Whether it's reporters at CNN mocking protesters while sympathizing with Wall Street traders; Rush Limbaugh referring to protestors as a "parade of human debris"; or a conservative reporter acting as an agent provocateur at a protest in Washington, DC, at best many in the media seem desperate not to face the fundamental issues at the heart of the demonstrations, at worst they place blame for our failed economy at the feet of the protestors -- mocking them as unemployed drains on the country.

It also comes as no surprise that Fox, which actively worked to build the Tea Party movement, has attacked these grassroots uprisings as "astroturf," and "petulant little children," and compared protestors to the "Unabomber." The Tea Party and Fox News fight to protect our system's fundamental inequalities while Occupy Wall Street is a fundamental challenge to it.

In 2000, Larry Summers tried to outsource fixing a global economic system he bore responsibility for to a girl in dreadlocks. Elites in the media and our political system are now attempting to foist the same responsibility to those camping in Zuccotti Park.

As the New York Times astutely pointed out: "It is not the job of the protesters to draft legislation. That's the job of the nation's leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies."

If those in the media casting aspersions on the protestors had spent a decade covering the underlying problems with our economy, instead of cheerleading the housing bubble; worked to expose the lies that led our country to war, instead of taking an administration at its word; and not allow themselves to be manipulated by political and media figures whose goal was simply to distort our political processes, there might not be a need to Occupy Wall Street. Instead the dreadlocked girl is still right -- we need a new system.

I believe that everyone in 'mainstream' politics and the media has gotten #OccupyWallStreet wrong. In an attempt to categorize what's happening (and so control it with a label), they've forgotten what can happen when the difference between a lie and the Truth becomes so obvious.

At it's most fundamental, I believe #OWS is a statement -- something like The current system is based on inequality; it is more nakedly apparent now than ever before. It manufactures inequality, suffering, violence and penury in favor of a minority over the majority; profit over persons; and it has to change.

An economic and markets website, ranting and raving in favor of austerity the other day, noted that for #OWS to have happened in America (whose population he described as being the most politically apathetic on earth) is a sign of exactly how serious things are. I disagreed with almost everything else in his post, but not that observation.

...Boston Consulting Group confirms, the "muddle through" is dead. And now it is time to face the facts. What facts? The facts which state that between household, corporate and government debt, the developed world has $20 trillion in debt over and above the sustainable threshold by the definition of "stable" debt to GDP of 180%.

The facts according to which all attempts to eliminate the excess debt have failed, and for now even the Fed's relentless pursuit of inflating our way out this insurmountable debt load have been for nothing. The facts which state that the only way to resolve the massive debt load is through a global coordinated debt restructuring (which would, among other things, push all global banks into bankruptcy) which, when all is said and done, will have to be funded by the world's financial asset holders: the middle-and upper-class, which, if BCS is right, have a ~30% one-time tax on all their assets to look forward to as the great mean reversion finally arrives and the world is set back on a viable path. But not before the biggest episode of "transitory" pain, misery and suffering in the history of mankind.

Good luck, politicians and holders of financial assets, you will need it because after Denial comes Anger, and only long after does Acceptance finally arrive.

As Rabin-Havt pointed out, Lard Boy and the Little Rupert Goebbels Happy Channel, along with Rethugs in Congress, are working overtime to demonize the #OWS protestors as unemployed radical hippie scum. They're defending the Banksters and the right of one per cent of the population to amass even more wealth.

What's clear is that the present crisis has been created by a relatively small group of people. When the economy failed because of what they'd done, they were given essentially free money -- our money -- to bail them out. They've kept most of it. And, as it turns out, the situation is worse than anyone admits or even wants to know, and that things will simply continue getting worse.

Those who have will just manage to squeak through comfortably. The rest of us... well; ... are there not prisons and work houses? ...let them die then, and decrease the surplus population.

The knowledge that we are screwed beyond measure -- that there's no escape, no matter what we do, as if we were about to collectively be hit by a mile-wide asteroid -- is putting people into the streets, to Occupy, to raise their voice. And the battle lines in what is in fact class warfare -- waged by the defenders of a minority against the rest of the country -- are being drawn. They're clearer all the time.

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