Sunday, January 3, 2010

Random Ramblings and Miscellaneous Musings

On Tuesday, December 29th, I posted a couple of videos under the heading Jane Hamsher is Right. Badtux the Snarky Penguin posted a comment about it on Wednesday, and thus began a running healthcare debate with ‘Tux that concluded on his blog on New Year’s Day.

While I don’t always agree with ‘Tux in regards to the causes of or solutions to the health care dilemma, I nevertheless have great respect for his opinions because his thinking often forces me to re-evaluate my own. Anything that prompts me to look at difficult problems from different angles and in a new light is not a bad thing. More on health care (or is that moron healthcare?) to follow in future posts.

On to other things:

My sincere apologies go out to novelist Bill Cameron for not getting reviews of his superb novels, Lost Dog and Chasing Smoke written and posted online before Christmas. I’m working on ’em, Bill; they’ll be ready, soon.

And others, still:

What kind of government do we have? Democracy (the mythical), kleptocracy (the obvious), pantisocracy (the ideal—and no, it’s not what you’re thinking), corporatocracy (the actual), psychopathocracy (the probable)? Lately, I’ve been leaning toward a combination of these—with the total exclusion of democracy and pantisocracy. Our government is a democracy in name only, and pantisocracy is a naïve Utopian dream. That leaves us with a kleptocratic, corporacratic psychopathocracy, which, to my way of thinking, is a dead-on accurate way of describing the government we have. No one can argue that a bunch of crazy fuckers aren’t running (ruining?) things.

A common lament of mechanics goes like this: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Well, folks, the whole damned country is broken—morally, ethically, fiscally, physically, structurally, politically and socially—and it needs many conscientious, right-thinking “mechanics” to fix it. And, no, business as usual is not going to fix our damaged, dying nation, it will only hasten its demise. We need radical new paradigms and outside-the-buns thinking to get this baby up and running, again; anything less than an all-out effort to engineer a total makeover will only set us up for another epic fail.

Shall we begin?

Q >>>