How It Works…..

Retreat, retreat, he cries in vain
we cannot stand such pain!
Another battle, another day’s fight
Eternally at war, both day and night.

Storms within, crashing and thrashing about,
filling each moment with fear and doubt.
Cries of anguish, hopes for a swift end
Denied with wounds that will not mend.

The crisis approaches, time will not wait.
It marches on, driven madly by fate.
We have no recourse, no other road to walk,
No great power to whom we may talk.

Morning arrives, seemingly mild and free
Until one considers all that must be
An intro, some pearls, a photo or two
Today’s magnificent Pearl, created just for you…..

–gigoid

“Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind.  Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.  And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecution.” — Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

See! They warned us, and we still didn’t listen! Almost every one of the men who were involved in the writing of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, at one time or another in the ensuing years, wrote a letter or essay discussing this very idea. They had just fought a long, hard battle to set up the safeguards for the freedoms we now supposedly enjoy, and were nervous that what they had accomplished would be lost in the future, due to the machinations of those among the human herd who make it their habit to prey on the rest of the group.

Corporations, and the politicians who take their money in return for legislation favoring those corporations, were considered just as dangerous to liberty as were religions; Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Mason, Adams, and a host of others all wrote their own version of warnings to their ancestors, naming rapacious corporate entities among the most dangerous enemies against which to guard. These men, who had already risked everything to create the nation we live in, had no desire to see that nation fall to internal enemies, and were careful to make sure that we would know…

But, nobody listened, and now we are reaping what we have sown. Corporations control Congress. If you believe otherwise, you are delusional, quite simply. It is only necessary to go down the list of those who have been elected, and tally up how their votes go on issues that concern the control of corporate activities. It becomes perfectly clear that NO legislation that seriously hinders what corporations are allowed to do in their pursuit of profit will ever be enacted.

If something that appears to be beneficial to the public does get voted in, you can bet there are codicils and amendments to the bill that essentially emasculate any attempts to curtail profit. Congress hasn’t enacted any laws beneficial to the public in over 75 years, that I can see, and I invite anyone to show me one bill that did so. Just one…. then we can discuss how long it took to find it…. and what THAT little item of information means….

Back in the mid-nineteenth century in America, a corrupt Federal judge was paid by corporate interests to make a ruling that, in essence, gave corporations “person-hood”, making them legal entities entitled to all the protection of the laws that govern individuals. Essentially, this gave these businesses the “right” to a profit, and allows them to charge their customers for any expenses they wish, no matter how egregious or outlandish, and their right to that is protected by law.

Every legal decision challenging that person-hood has been defeated in the intervening years, on those few occasions when anyone has tried to throw off the chains the law has placed on us all. The amount of money spent on lobbying, to control the laws that get made, far exceeds what is spent on education, healthcare, or almost any other publicly beneficial programs, (not war, you’ll note; war is good business…) and in the eyes of the 1%, it is money well-spent…..

Now, PAC’s for both the Democratic corporations, and the Republican corporations (yes, they are…. there is no real difference between the corporations and the pundits they have paid for; they’re speaking the same language, and have the same goals….) are all set to spend BILLIONS of dollars, dollars originally ripped out of YOUR pockets for stuff you don’t really want or need, to spread lies, misinformation, accusations, and prestidigitation around the public airways until we are all sick of it…..

Well, until some of us are…. I’m sick of it already, and they haven’t really ramped it up yet….. I think I’m going to go buy some aspirin to go along with my other pain medications; I can feel a headache coming on, and I don’t think it will let up until December….

“I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older.” — Michael de Montaigne
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FAIRY, n.  A creature, variously fashioned and endowed, that formerly inhabited the meadows and forests.  It was nocturnal in its habits, and somewhat addicted to dancing and the theft of children.  The fairies are now believed by naturalist to be extinct, though a clergyman of the Church of England saw three near Colchester as lately as 1855, while passing through a park after dining with the lord of the manor.  The sight greatly staggered him, and he was so affected that his account of it was incoherent.  In the year 1807 a troop of fairies visited a wood near Aix and carried off the daughter of a peasant, who had been seen to enter it with a bundle of clothing.  The son of a wealthy _bourgeois_ disappeared about the same time, but afterward returned.  He had seen the abduction been in pursuit of the fairies.  Justinian Gaux, a writer of the fourteenth century, avers that so great is the fairies’ power of transformation that he saw one change itself into two opposing armies and fight a battle with great slaughter, and that the next day, after it had resumed its original shape and gone away, there were seven hundred bodies of the slain which the villagers had to bury.  He does not say if any of the  wounded recovered.  In the time of Henry III, of England, a law was made which prescribed the death penalty for “Kyllynge, wowndynge, or mamynge” a fairy, and it was universally respected. — Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary”

A Code of Morals

Now Jones had left his new-wed bride to keep his house in order,
And hied away to the Hurrum Hills above the Afghan border,
To sit on a rock with a heliograph; but ere he left he taught
His wife the working of the Code that sets the miles at naught.

And Love had made him very sage, as Nature made her fair;
So Cupid and Apollo linked , per heliograph, the pair.
At dawn, across the Hurrum Hills, he flashed her counsel wise —
At e’en, the dying sunset bore her busband’s homilies.

He warned her ‘gainst seductive youths in scarlet clad and gold,
As much as ‘gainst the blandishments paternal of the old;
But kept his gravest warnings for (hereby the ditty hangs)
That snowy-haired Lothario, Lieutenant-General Bangs.

‘Twas General Bangs, with Aide and Staff, who tittupped on the way,
When they beheld a heliograph tempestuously at play.
They thought of Border risings, and of stations sacked and burnt —
So stopped to take the message down — and this is whay they learnt —

“Dash dot dot, dot, dot dash, dot dash dot” twice. The General swore.
“Was ever General Officer addressed as ‘dear’ before?
“‘My Love,’ i’ faith! ‘My Duck,’ Gadzooks! ‘My darling popsy-wop!’
“Spirit of great Lord Wolseley, who is on that mountaintop?”

The artless Aide-de-camp was mute; the gilded Staff were still,
As, dumb with pent-up mirth, they booked that message from the hill;
For clear as summer lightning-flare, the husband’s warning ran: —
“Don’t dance or ride with General Bangs — a most immoral man.”

[At dawn, across the Hurrum Hills, he flashed her counsel wise —
But, howsoever Love be blind, the world at large hath eyes.]
With damnatory dot and dash he heliographed his wife
Some interesting details of the General’s private life.

The artless Aide-de-camp was mute, the shining Staff were still,
And red and ever redder grew the General’s shaven gill.
And this is what he said at last (his feelings matter not): —
“I think we’ve tapped a private line. Hi! Threes about there! Trot!”

All honour unto Bangs, for ne’er did Jones thereafter know
By word or act official who read off that helio.
But the tale is on the Frontier, and from Michni to Mooltan
They know the worthy General as “that most immoral man.”

Rudyard Kipling

Ah yes, the eternal curse of writing…. once the words are gone, they can never be called back…. This is kind of spooky in a way, as it could easily be seen as a prediction of the future…. Just imagine the idea of texting in the poem, instead of the heliograph, and it could have been written yesterday… or even tomorrow…. History is full of little ironies, isn’t it?
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