GOP - Making Everything Old New Again

"Conservative" 

A Word Nibbled to Death by Time

It wasn't pretty, either. When definitions no longer exist, 

speaking louder and faster become the order of the day.

In the olden days there was, at least theoretically, an actual contextual meaning for the term "conservative." Even then it was a word usable only with only the most awkward style of comparative meaning -- that is, when considered by itself, a definition quickly became quite nebulous. To accommodate this "syntactic challenge," conversational references to, for example, "conservative" things or "conservative" values, for instance, usually descended quickly to "what it didn't mean" and were augmented by all manner of comparisons to to "things" or "values" which its antonym might suggest were present.

However, as time passed even the task of selecting the "correct" antonym began to also descend into the same uncertain waters. "Liberal" or "progressive" seem to be the most recent efforts to describe "things" and "values" which were, by definitions never really made formally concrete, antithetical to "conservative things and values."

Of course this modern hodge podge of twisted concepts and labored efforts to bias communication did not occur spontaneously, that is, did not occur as organically as mere "lillies in the field." Instead, the current dichotomy was patiently developed with long, tedious planning and at great cost in the public opinion manipulating bunkers of the billionaire class.

Whatever's on your mind. [image]

The result was that many voters who never before enjoyed access to words with so many syllables suddenly found themselves entirely comfortable with the use of this particular term, "conservative." In no time at all its casual definition [in its use by this crowd] was entirely "vaporized into the dusty annals of forgotten history" only to be replaced instantly by absolutely whatever meaning such minds might have sought to add to their discourse in the precise moment it was uttered.

Conversations including a reference to "conservatism" may as well have been drunken arguments conducted with a rapidly rotating Wheel of Fortune.

[There's absolutely not even the slightest reason to worry about hurting the feelings of any of these "word salad chatterers" by commenting about them this way on the blog. If for no other reason, the "syllable count" typical to these posts would have sent them scattering in confused horror after they had encountered the first sentence.]

Things of Today and Things of Yesterday

It will help to hide your calendar.

The mad rush "back to the imaginary past" was predicted long before the GOP's "girders popped" in preparation for this election cycle. In the darkest, most frightening days immediately after the Republican Recession's looting frenzy had cooled a bit, President Obama made a prescient comment regarding the state of mind of voters.

Among the "non-lobbyist" crowd, everyone who had possessed wealth in practically any form -- real estate equity, 401 K accounts, retirement savings, and so on -- lost 40% of everything in few weeks. The President accurately foretold that these brutally injured "Middle Classers" would be inclined to revert to furtive, imagined memories of their individual "good old days." Although few Americans realized this in the frightening days of 2008, experts have concluded that a full recovery from the disaster will at least take two decades.

[Read more ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE and Social Trends PEW RESEARCH]

"And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," Obama said. [April 13, 2008 - in the worst days of the Great Republican Recession - Christianity Today]

The New Dark Ages

The GOP's Twelve Step Program to

Re-institute History in Retrograde

Where in the world did they get these ideas? Oh, right.
The Dark Ages [ image - jonasdero]

The term "Conservative" wordlessly embodies an eager rejection of the present reality and a full retrograde impulse to re-establish mythical conditions imagined to have prevailed in the past.

1. Invading the Middle East - Again

More than a few of the current GOP Presidential candidates are proposing another invasion of Iraq and Syria with a US land army. Predictably, the burden of revealing important details about such a military adventure are lost amid the propaganda. The Dark Ages were annotated by one Crusade after another to "liberate" Middle Eastern real estate into the hands of the Pope and the Nobles, but we don't have to travel that far into the past to understand this one.

[Read more  Still Fighting George W. Bush's Battles SALON]

2. Criminalizing Minority Status

This takes three main directions. A. Complaints from black Americans with respect to the wide spread police shootings are "dispatched" by GOP candidates by citing racist epithets. B. GOP politicians stubbornly adhere to complete opposition to any political resolution to managing the current immigration crisis. C. GOP political candidates openly supporting the establishment of "blanket" detention camps in the US for landed immigrants from specific regions.

[Read more The Poor Get Prison INSTITUTE OF POLICY STUDIES]

3. Cultural and Religious Purity

Openly Dominionist GOP Presidential candidates espouse the specific supremacy of Christian [Western] values and policy. Kasich is supporting an international propaganda campaign to promote "Western" values, while Donald Trump has "quietly" [indecisively] supported a policy requiring religious identification tags on Muslims. Humanity's dark history is littered with such programs.

[Read more The Right Wing's Purity Culture SALON]

4. Reconstructing the Division of Berlin

Every time Donald Trump bellows about "building a wall" between the US and Mexico, MeanMesa cannot avoid remembering the wall which divided Berlin for years -- including the corpses strewn about on the Eastern side when desperate Germans attempted to run the gauntlet through the unmanned, automatic machine guns. Building an impenetrable wall between the US and all contiguous neighbors amounts to roughly the same thing.

The Berlin Wall was a constant reminder of why people wanted to escape the crushing hardship of an utterly failed social system. Ironically, within a few years after their construction, the Trump walls will probably be a constant reminder of the same thing.

[Read more Building Trump's Wall NEWSWEEK]

5. Mutual Assured Destruction [MAD] 

People who clearly have no idea what occurs when an H-Bomb detonates over a populated area should not recklessly tease the Russian Federation. The United States and Russia still have -- by far -- the largest and most credible nuclear deterrent weaponry. Restarting the Cold War with the Russian Federation would initiate future decades of nuclear insanity -- not to mention gigantic arms expenditures crippling economic stability on both sides.

Those Europeans who lived in the Dark Ages were almost constantly threatened by unending wars -- the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War and more. The United States and Russia have been threatening each other [occasionally threatening more and less] with nuclear war for over fifty years.

[Read more Republican candidates on Russia, Ukraine and Crimea ABC NEWS]

6. Validating Cultural Supremacy 

GOP political campaigns are now openly promoting the psychology of [US National] exceptionalism based on biased interpretations of history. History reveals that when this becomes the national psychology, war inducing jingoism follows rather quickly in its wake. The psychology of exceptionalism "excuses" citizens who think that actually being informed about international realities is an unnecessary burden to qualify one to formulate an "informed" [valid/realistic] opinion about national policy.

[Read more  The Problem of American Exceptionalism - PEW RESEARCH]

7. Establishing Statutory Law Based on Religious Ideology

Although these ideas have been embedded in GOP political campaigns only at the level of innuendos, the trend is toward far more specific references. The GOP base responds well to the fantasy of Biblical credentials and Biblical policies when espoused by Republican candidates. Even the mere mention of creating statutory law based on admittedly ill defined Biblical principles excites poll numbers. To MeanMesa this is reminiscent of the suffocating Catholic theocracy in Europe during the Dark Ages.

[Read more Republicans - Dismantle Constitution and Make Christianity the National Religion POLITICUSUSA]

8. Creating a Cynical Crisis in Trust 

We can only speculate the long term effects of a determined, well financed effort to fundamentally shake the trust Americans have traditionally held for their representative government. Nationally, there has never been a period entirely absent of complaints and suspicions, the the current wave of total mistrust exceeds anything similar in the past. The effort has employed every possible ploy including the "kitchen sink" to accomplish this among a nearly illiterate electorate -- raw xenophobia, intimations of God's wrath, nearly unilateral dread from no longer controlling the economy -- all driven to a fever pitch by an entire "news" network hell bent on completing the job.

[Read more MeanMesa America's Dark New World of Total Mistrust]

9. Cultural Paranoia and Fear 

This refers to a general fear and anxiety. Americans haven't had a moment's rest of this onslaught, and the results are telling. Fear has become the "currency of the day." For perhaps a majority of Americans a television talk show which doesn't invoke even more fear is generally characterized as suspect or unrealistic. Although the President joked about this development with respect to the GOP Presidential candidates, the brutal reality of it stretches far afield  --- beyond just the campaigns -- to include an  un-examined fear of even the most innocuous daily encounters for millions of Americans.

The electorate has been groomed into a state in which fear and hopeless malaise can be turned to a political advantage.

[Read more Jimmy Carter's Malaise Speech in 2016 USNEWS]

10. Bigotry as the Status Quo 

The fear and xenophobia usher in raw bigotry. Americans who disapprove of police shooting among black citizens mitigate their criticism with rambling justifications -- shadowy justifications carefully designed and embedded into the back grounds of their minds by professional think tanks and other experts employed to mitigate public opinion. Anyone considering this to be an exaggeration or an embellishment need only listen for "buts." "Yes, it was awful, but..." "Yes, it was racist, but..." "Yes, it was unnecessary, but..."

Racism almost certainly has many foundations and derives from many social roots, but for oligarchs public opinion schemes validating racism, justifying it and even tolerating violent racism are "tried and tested" means for maintaining a divided electorate -- something necessary for them to accomplish their ambitions.

[Read more NYTIMES]

11. Lower Standards of Living and Poverty 

During the decade or so that the tea party has been holding political sway, the American population has descended from being the best fed in the world to a nadir which sees one in six children facing food uncertainty. Now, although the oligarchs have dispatched the tea party as no longer useful, the poverty remains -- and continues to grow. This tragedy may be shocking, but we can be encouraged by the fact that it is not an inexplicable "mysterious development." Both the process and the consequences are entirely consistent with the "larger plan" initiated by the oligarch class during the Reagan era.

Conditions of life during the Dark Ages were marked by a desperate "dog eat dog" poverty and superstitious fear conveniently induced by religion. The ambitious plan of the billionaires is to persuade Americans to accept oligarchy and dynastic wealth as a new, permanent status quo in the democracy -- in the same way that Dark Ages peasants accepted the "Divine Right" of the noble plutocrats who ruled them.

[GOP Poverty Report Washington Post]

12. Rewriting History 

Written history poses a far less serious threat to those who would rule men's minds when no one knows it, but if straight, out and out illiteracy can't be achieved, twisting the content of history books will do almost as well. This was, for example, one of the root causes of the sectarian violence after the US invasion of Iraq. For years Iraqi Sunnis had been taught that they represented a majority of the Iraqi population -- the opposite of the true distribution of Sunni and Shiite demographics.

In domestic education the Texas School Board's well financed effort to promote "conservative" ideology through subsidizing text books for other states is another example.

This leads to a patient effort which leads large numbers of "educated" Americans to fail to criticize the policies and individuals who have, frankly, damaged the country. The long term consequence is the creation of entire generations deeply saturated by such propaganda and as a result, a population no longer able to discern the qualities of character necessary for competent performance in a high office. Understandably, celebrity candidates, for example, are confused with those having competence for national leadership. 

[Read more - Think Progress]

The Vanishing, Existential Difference 

Between "Perfect" and "Failed"

Especially when discussing religion, politics, 

current events or policy... but probably not sex.

A few years ago the daily email orders from the GOP's think tank bunkers must have flatly stated that the use of the term "failed" would be injected into all Republican campaign rhetoric and public statements at every possible opportunity. As a result we now have a "failed" economic policy, a "failed" foreign policy, a "failed" immigration policy, a "failed" health insurance reform, a "failed" Wall Street reform program, a "failed" infrastructure reconstruction program and plenty of other "failed" things.

Wait. Would it be "out of line" to insist that anyone using this blanket condemnation of "failed" be also obliged to propose a "perfect" alternative? Or, if the "perfect" option turns out to be an unfair requirement, could some other option described merely as "successful" replace it?

MeanMesa suspects that such a demand would produce some serious "dead air time" in the relentless broadcast of the mouth junk emanating from the oligarchs' ideology bunkers. In fact -- it might produce a crisis-like "lock jaw" epidemic in the New York FOX studio.

In reality [where we have to live...] the FOX propaganda authors might be frozen in their tracks if they were suddenly required to begin describing policy promising "success" instead of simply those foretelling either already accomplished "failure" or future, inevitable "failure." In no time at all we will "re-arrive" at the point where those so enamored with "failed" seek ideological refuge in the syntactic quagmire of "Conservative."

Even after Donald Trump's "campaign" inevitably obliterates itself when not even the hill billies of the GOP base will remain interested in voting for him, the allure of the "imaginary refuge" promised by this retrograde fantasy will continue. MeanMesa suspects that not even the coming landslide defeat of the GOP in 2016 will significantly alter this carefully crafted mindset. It is simply too useful as a political manipulation tool for the oligarch class.

No matter how intently the sold out media promotes the fantasy, there really is a reality. It is all around us, and dealing with it is not optional or discretionary. The Republicans have systematically thrown every identifiable demographic "under the bus" at this point -- with the exception of the white, information challenged, illiterate racists and smelly, starry eyed fundamentalists. With this "retrograde fantasy" tactic, the brilliant GOP leadership has clearly decided to "split off" any rational base voters not yet thrown under the bus and...throw them under the bus.

At some point the plutocrats will finally take the "big step" of positioning themselves to ignore electoral outcomes, but in the meantime, they will hand FOX and the others the task of convincing those already "under the bus" by that time that they are not "under the bus."

2015 - Pandora as a Dark "Thoroughly Modern Millie?"

Pandora's Chest: 2015 Version

"Hope Springing Eternal" or "Romantic Myth?" [painting]

A note from MeanMesa: We find it a short search indeed when we seek out some overly tedious listing of the troubles in the world. One presumes that dwelling on such negative impulses is merely an indulgence, a means to pass the time while doing no real harm and inflicting no sustained injury on one's otherwise more optimistic psyche. But even this flirtation with the contents of the Lady's chest becomes somewhat more grim and even dire when the facts and figures accompany less willingly flippant.

A few of those "first demons to take flight" may merit a more sober review. History seems to plod its way toward another "pivot." Matters which are not mysteries begin to appear as matters which must be obscured for comfort. Welcome to the humanities' "garden of good and evil." Here are five short matters which seem to have "returned to her chest."

1. Humans Are Showing No Signs Of Altering Unsustainable Population Growth.

A "Patchy" History of "Reproducing" Responsibly

Blind bumbling is okay if there a little luck available.

Responding to observation and information should be the last option.

Human primates have done "quite well" for themselves when it comes to populating their way to the top of the planetary food chain. Around 72,000 BCE the human population hit one of its most severe nadirs. In southeastern Africa where most human primates had lived for centuries, the climate gradually entered a remarkably long period of drought. The availability of water, traditional food crops and game became worse and worse until the total population of humans on the planet descended to around 2,000. [Read more  here - TELEGRAPH/UK]

Since those dark days so long ago in Africa the humans have, indeed, "stepped up to the plate." Perhaps everyone simply decided that making babies wasn't such an unfairly arduous, thankless task after all.

The date scale is logarithmic. [image source]

All this good work begun in 72,000 BCE seemed to be working splendidly. By the time Thomas Jefferson had been elected the planet could boast of a human population of one billion.

However, when we look at the time scale along the bottom of the chart [below] we see that performing this task, that is, "increasing the planetary population by another billion," was showing an astonishing development of both speed, reliability and efficiency.

The "population prognosticators" furnishing the estimates for future population growth have quietly slowed the rate of the arrival of additional billions of humans after the shortest span of 12 years in 1999. No need to worry. If the additions slow to 16 years -- or even 20, 30 or 50 -- the point of this post remains uncomfortably solid. The geopolitical, economic and cultural changes required to move this "rate of addition" from where it is currently to even 50 years would require a, frankly, unimaginable level of cooperation and resources.

Population growth by the billion. [source - WIKI]

While this post could continue for pages and pages about the relentlessly increasing planetary over population, we must depart from this "facts and figures" here to make room for a few "other issues." It was important to get this part completed right away, so we might concentrate our attention on these other, associated parts of this post's topic.

2. The Global Population's Consumption Cannot Afford 

The Demand Requiring Full Productivity.

What Are All These Humans Supposed To Be Doing?

For a few hundred centuries it all looked fairly balanced.

For most of the earlier period of human development there has been no shortage of work to be done by the planet's inhabitants at any particular moment. The nature of this work has always been a mixture of tasks based on the various needs of the day. Although abbreviated histories paint a picture of "food" and "fighting" as the primary occupations of our ancestors, we can be certain that a vast array of other tasks produced necessary "consumables" all along the way.

However, generally speaking, prior to the industrial revolution the quantity of "consumables" being produced remained curiously equivalent to the corresponding quantity being "consumed." History, for example, yields few references to ancient civilizations which had produced such a surplus of food, baskets, chariots, ships or anything else that the contemporary economy began suffering from such products experiencing catastrophic price collapses.

These matters were balanced, and they were not intentionally balanced by policy or any particular ambition to balance them, but instead, they were balanced by the "organic" level of need for them and the corresponding capacity for  the production of them. Still, the industrial revolution was, just as much, also a natural human development, even though it greatly changed this traditional balance -- more or less permanently.

Masked Plague Doctors [image]

At a number of times during the "civilized" period of human habitation certain conditions interrupted this "organic" balance between production and consumption, and, as a consequence, also the "normal" measure of value associated with labor and commodities. For example, after the Black Plague had decimated the European labor force, wages increased. Higher wages were necessary to compete in the depleted labor market, but in time those higher wages became discretionary income and catapulted the European economy from its musty feudal past into the beginning stages of a middle class phenomenon.

But now, in the 21st Century, this balance seems to be a concept rapidly fading into historical irrelevancy. In the seventy millennia since the "difficulties" in Africa there has always been "enough work" to continuously consume the full efforts of the entire labor force of the planet. Everyone needed "something," and all those "somethings" required a worker to "produce" them. If there were some state similar to "unemployment" in 20,000 BCE, the consequences would have been fairly immediate extinction.

The possibility for this sensible arrangement to continue faded rather quickly after the industrial revolution's extreme advances in productivity hit the old equation. The fundamentals shifted, and they shifted in a troubling, "willy nilly" fashion. While productivity increased, the consumption markets decreased. Vast market populations probably wanted what was being produced but could not afford to purchase it. At first this was not such a problem, but that was then. This is now.

Although the "consumption power" of global markets has increased, it has not increased sufficiently to consume what is being produced. More importantly, that "consumption power" is no longer great enough to drive markets to produce what can be afforded by those vast populations. As a consequence, there are huge numbers of humans existing in economies without a "consumption pressure" which can offer them an opportunity to work and produce.

We can go ahead and call this the economic "Third World" so long as we are not too picky with our definitions.

The crowd which so habitually uses the "global market place" term to justify all sorts of horribly exploitative plans would like for us to consider these populations as potential markets "in development." They aren't. At least, they won't be any time soon. Further, these "in development" markets are not all located in distant "Third World" economies, either. They are springing up in Western industrialized nations, too.

3. A Functional Global Economy Relies On Increased "Consumption Pressure" - More Opportunities To Work.

Is It Really "Unemployment" 

When There's Nothing To Do?

Is It "Economic Development" When Mostly Nothing Develops?

The newly industrialized world created by the industrial revolution blew it.

While a small percentage of the increases in productivity went to establish a middle class, most went into the founding of dynastic family fortunes. The "missing ingredient" is revealed by the fact that practically none of the "return" of this increased productivity was directed at developing consumption markets with economies capable of purchasing the increased production.

Don't start feeling guilty. We have no reason to consider this as some sort of unactualized, discretionary, liberal "altruism." Instead, if it were ever to be undertaken, history would regard it as an imminently realistic, frantic response to avoid the economic cataclysm approaching in an otherwise inevitable future. The global economy will never work with participation stringently limited to an economically active class amounting to 20% or 30% of the global population.

Almost all of the creation of this modern result had been very nicely "finished" centuries ago. Of course the geopolitical, economic wreckage -- along with the destructive impact of the crippling, dynastic family fortunes -- remains for those of us in this century to clean up and patch back together. At least this will be our task if we don't fancy having the whole thing crash into the rocks.

By "crash" we are describing something significantly more destructive, more global and more terrifying than a mere "market correction." Even this dismal forecast has not yet added the additional "economic aggravation" of the now unavoidable economic impact of massive climate change approaching.

The rest of this world has to go back to work. The efforts to "coax" this economic resurgence into existence during the last century have failed -- in a very, very big way. Today's world has a huge unemployment problem causing a huge shortage of the discretionary income which might potentially become a future "consumption market"-- along with, for various reasons, an incredible deficit of resources available to remedy this situation. We -- in the industrialized world -- also seem to be demonstrating a shocking lack of creativity -- not to mention such an obviously flimsy grip on the reality around us. If that were not enough to "rattle our cages," we can add to this list a shocking lack of foresight and an eerie absence of any particular impulse for our own planetary economic self-preservation.

This would be the reality we unthinkingly created for ourselves. Given its history of development, this was inevitable.

4. The Modern Model For A Functional World Economy 

Is Wrong.

No Wonder This Thing Isn't Improving

Trying even harder isn't going to help.

The mere suggestion that ISIL could be undercut by promoting jobs for the young Muslims who might, otherwise, become recruits was met -- at least met in the Republican media -- with "non-negotiable" derision. However, this partisan political maneuvering really only presents half of the story.

The idea's "unmentioned" corollary is not particularly obscured. The media scheme had "traction" because a majority of Americans are quite skeptical about the possibility that the US, with or without the country's "anti-ISIL" European allies, could successfully undertake job creation in the dismal wreckage of wither Syria or Iraq. "Nation building" was an idea which never quite recovered its shine after the thinly veiled failure and painfully visible largess of the Bush W. scams in Afghanistan and Iraq thrashed through tens -- or hundreds -- of billions without noticeable results.

MeanMesa has to join the ranks of the skeptics on this one. This country might be able to accomplish "nation building" at some future date, but for now our first priority must target "nation restoration" on the domestic front. No reasonably informed "Third World" citizen could be expected to welcome the arrival of U.S. "nation builders" after considering the perilous condition of the nation sending them.

Yet, considering this proposal in a larger picture, "nation building" probably represents the most effective strategy to which we might direct the national resources we are going to inevitably assign to solving the ISIL -- and other regional -- problems in the long run. [For example, Ukraine's problem could use a little "economy building" assistance. Instead, we will probably wind up "over arming" the parties to the conflict.]

"Nation building." If only we were a little better at it! Unhappily, "free market capitalism" creates profoundly inept idealists and patently unconvincing altruists. On the other hand, that same economic model does create feckless hedge fund managers, acting in complicity through their subservient Congressional "employees," anxious to extend Wall Street's global financial hegemony to anywhere at any cost.

The part of this process that infuriates its international victims around the world is the blase', phlegmatic nature of the "gentrified market parasites" whose think tanks and lobbyists propose one scheme after another with consistently hideous consequences. That "fury" becomes the precise cultural foundation of the problems we find ourselves unable to address. The irony would be classic if it weren't covered with so much blood, fear, hatred and suffering. Unhappily, there is every prospect for more of the same in the foreseeable future.

5. The Obsolete Existing Social Culture Is Patiently Slaughtering The Planet

Could 3,000 Years of Ambitious,

 Ancient Patriarchs Possibly Be Wrong?

This might be survivable if it were just the Taliban and ISIL.

3,000 Years, Tennis Shoes, Sawz-All and Fairy Tale[IRNA]

All around the world in 2,000 or 3,000 BCE tribal patriarchs were scaring the crap out of all the illiterates in their villages with mythological tales. Each fable had a very convenient "social reaffirmation" of the unquestioned authority of the old men repeating the nonsense.

Control was everything. These old chiefs, big men, warlords, prophets and priests knew that women were, well, "more useful" and "less trouble" if they were property. Controlling sex was handy because the teenage "cannon fodder" of the next decade's tribal wars had to come from somewhere.

Naturally, the authenticity of the mythology had to be maintained at all costs. Relating it to infants still suckling their mothers' teats was fairly effective -- even when the "story line" had long ago become whimsical and impossible.

The "durability" of these uniformly destructive fantasies, their perpetual reinterpretation and their annual embellishment to conveniently demonize the patriarchs' latest competitor is a modern anomaly. The grisly aftermath might be somewhat more comprehensible if the outrages were being conducted by well fed, successful, educated sorts who had simply been indoctrinated by the latest generation of "holy men," but evidence of the "prosperity" prophesied by the ancient promises has never materialized.

The modern result is almost always no more than another string of rotting corpses. It is this in Nigeria and Congo, in the ruined Yazidi villages, in wild regions of Western Pakistan, around the Chinese Uyghurs, in the wreckage of Somalia, between the battle lines of the Sunnis and Shiites, among the crowded populations of Palestinians, Jews and Persians and elsewhere. In the quieter world in the west birth control is attacked by the Catholics and the rich Dominionists -- even in the midst of a world which already has nearly twice as many souls as it can feed.

Okay. There really may be some sort of "narrative" that can be offered up to buffer the outrages of each of these disasters and the dozens of others, but those worn out, ancient "stories" had already grown far too expensive and destructive a century ago. The planet and the human species may have continued the mechanical march into oblivion, but the human minds -- all creativity and bravery addled by these fairy tales and priests -- have become lethally ossified.

The plan was that we would continue to develop.

Each time a glimmer of hope emerged from some bunch "moving on" beyond the ancient poison, the all consuming narcotic of modern ideology lurched into the breech to guarantee that no one anywhere would start thinking straight in the momentary interregnum.

This world can no longer survive this murderous, fairy tale driven mayhem, and it's high time that the excuses stopped. There is now -- officially -- no more time to fight these ancient, theoretical battles.

Yet, looking quickly around this bleeding globe, there is no champion is sight. As of yet no one has stood up boldly to offer an alternative to this so compelling that it will free the humans from this deadlocked self-immolation.

If any of us are pondering the qualities of our next "leader," perhaps we should consider the mandates implied by these few catastrophes which seem to be unavoidably awaiting us.

MeanMesa will be posting about leadership next. Watch this space, and thanks for visiting.