What do you think the Future is going to look like?

I was reminded of this great movie quote today:

“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing... he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance... Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen....”

- Albert Brooks from Broadcast News

And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. - Matt.24: 4-5

And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works. - 2nd Cor.11: 14-15

When Fear Follows....

PBS has "Bush's War". Watch it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/

Four-thousand, now. And still going "strong". This "war" has now lasted longer than WWII, and will continue past the time our economy can no longer support it and until the US is part of the NAU. This wrong-headed, stupid invasion that should never have happened still should have been over in two months; and another sign of our despotic, dying Empire is that we don't know the way to "start", fight, finish, or "prosecute a war", be it a "just" one or a criminal enterprise.

If there is ever an opportunity to write a history of the United States of America that extends past the next twenty years it will include these facts:

We could have sealed borders north and south, patrolled them indefinately, provided health care for all US Citizens and solved the Social Security problem for what we will throw into this pit of national despair and pay in interest, economic damage and blood.

When Fear Follows

The Bell Tolls the Idiocy of Big Bizness continued....

The Bell continues to toll throughout the bizness werld.

I've noticed lately that it's VPs.

And, it's VPs simply because we have too many of them. We've always had too many of them, be they golf buddies or relatives.

And they don't really do anything. Oh yes, they're supposed to "track" things, yeah... hummmmmm. Must get a Porsche and a cuppa coffee... and say "hummmmmm" a lot (Re.: Office Space). Track things that are already being tracked by subordinates -- clerks, and assitants... or track things that don't need tracking, because everybody knows that THEY ARE ALL ****** UP TO BEGIN WITH AND YOU ARE TRACKING ****!

But be ye glad, Oh Yes, Be Ye Glad, Big Business idiocy doesn't stop with eliminating VP positions that shouldn't have be created to begin with.... No, they eliminate the one VP who is actually doing something. All other VPs are free to take golf vaca at will and every Monday and Friday off. Whoopee!

Yes folks, it's still alive in its deadness. Still alive and slowly eating itself.

Hypocrisy 101, Terrelle Pryor and Big-time College sports....

Listening to Bruce Hooley's hypocritical critique of Terrelle Pryor's press conference and answer to Tim May's "image" question, I thought about the forthright answer: Do we really care if he's a good or bad kid?

Pryor replied that "I don't need to fix my image", because "it doesn't really matter if I'm a good or bad kid, you guys are here because I can ball."

At that point (and I really like May's stuff, especially his blacklisted "non-coverage" of Tressel -- and yes, Pryor should have taken the visits to Oregon and Penn St.) Pryor may have been the only honest person in the room.

As long as he's not "gettin' the Goose on" before practice and riding around with guns in the trunk of his JT Chrysler supplied leaser, then he's good to go.

http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaab/news?slug=dw-academics031808&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

Fools and Simpletons....

Crosspost from The Assistant Village Idiot

Fools believe they are wise. They search for the abstruse or esoteric, whose very mention brands them as someone in the know, much like poseur ordering wine, or everyone talking about the theater. Full of themselves and impressed with their own deep thoughts, they make just enough sense to be irritating. Simpletons aren’t sure whether their comments are intelligent or not, they just go with what seems sensible. Fools order a Syrah because it’s from the Northern Rhone Valley, simpletons order the Shiraz because they had it once at someone’s house and liked it. It’s the same grape, grown in a different place. Many people claim to know the difference. I don’t know if they do or not. I don’t. I don’t remember whether I liked shiraz or not, which any idiot would do, and why I’m still only the assistant.

Here we go.... Now, what to do?

Crosspost from Rublev's Dog....

While I am bearish on America, with its state-managed economy and its immorality, I refrain from being an all-out alarmist. I never bought into the Y2K scare, for example. I believe the economic erosion for middle and lower class North Americans will be a long, undulating descent. Regardless, what to do?

1) Trust the Lord. Yes, that sounds terribly cliche. I hate it when some apostle of super-spirituality says, "God is in control." The Lord is ultimately in control, but man is ultimately responsible. God allows men to act and reap the consequences of their actions. Faith lays hold of the eternal and keeps the temporal in perspective. The sufferings of this life are not to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in us in the age to come. With Christ as the anchor of our souls, we remain steadfast in doing the right thing, even unto death.

2) Get right with your neighbors. You're going to need them on your side if and when times get hard.

3) Each visit to the grocery, buy extra pallets of water. Your family should stockpile two months worth of water and vittles. Storing up canned goods is probably a good idea, but water is indispensible. If the consumer market sees a dramatic, sudden spike in prices (resulting from currency devaluation and rising shipping costs), there will be panic; then comes hording, sporadic shortages, and food prices spiraling into higher inflation. It's always good to have plenty of water on hand.

4) Try to grow your own food and can it. We're asking the Lord for enough rain in this parched area during the spring and summer for a successful garden.

5) Arm yourself. I'll answer to the Lord for killing a man while defending my family; I will not answer to Him for allowing someone to harm my family. Buy a long gun, preferably a shotgun. Handguns are more dangerous around children, and they require a background check and waiting period. Depending on the direction taken by legislators and courts, handguns would likely be the first weapons outlawed and confiscated. Teach your younguns how to respect and safely use firearms.

Bottom-line: panic is useless; lack of preparedness is senseless.

School Income Tax... I told you so.

School officials explain lack of big property tax decrease

The bureaucrats in favor of taxing the working poor made a lot of promises, while those of us who took the time to wade through all the misinformation put out by the BOE continued to have doubts and questions that could not be avoided or answered, although Martin/Bunting, et al. succeeded in confusing enough people to get this abomination passed.

Check out your own total School Income Tax and property tax totals, but we are paying the same amount in property tax plus the additional SIT tax on two salaries. And the extra forms to fill out. Ain't it a joy?

And isn't it strange that the only people who made out on this deal are the commercial/rental property owners? Can a comparison be drawn of the rental property owners and BOE to lobbyists and Congress?

Of course I am sure that they are passing on the savings to the consumers/renters.

Mr. Bunting's favorite quote seems to be " Berkeley's 17th Law": "A great many problems do not have accurate answers, but do have approximate answers, from which sensible decisions can be made."

Well, the quote itself seems like an "out" -- and just the kind of “confuscation” needed to dupe some taxpayers. I wonder which set of books they’ll show the next time they hit us up. They do need to avoid “accurate answers” at all cost when they are costing us money.

They are bringing "relativism" economics down to the farm and losing no sleep over this. From their point of view the taxpayer owes whatever amount of money they can scam us out of.

Now we've got the English printing money that isn't really there....

Bank of England injects 5 billion pounds into money markets

A Quick Macroeconomics Lesson....

FROM RUBLEV'S DOG
http://rublevsdog.blogspot.com/

A Quick Macroeconomics Lesson

http://rublevsdog.blogspot.com/2008/03/quick-macroeconomics-lesson.html

How Multi-national Corporations Avoid Paying Taxes....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15704.htm

Sick, sick, sick people. Lord help us....

I have been meaning to do this for several years, but for some reason never found the time, outside of five minutes tonight.

Under one of my web-aliases, I checked up on the Stormfront (white supremacist) forum.

Through my years on the web, I've spent a bit of my time ridiculing these guys, but apart from jabbing at their posts on various forums (islamonline.net, the extinct boottotheskull.com etc...), I really hadn't looked into the mouth of the beast.

Suffice to say, it didn't take any more (less) than the five minutes mentioned above.

These guys are one of the many reasons that God is going to judge this world and its sinners very soon.

I have never been anywhere on the web that more quickly made me both spiritually and physically cringe.

I imagine that these guys, along with pedophiles, are the bottom feeders of the mirror of society that is the www.

The "Springerization" of our modern world that we who still have some (questionable) sense of morals talk about, is the small, small tip of the "sin nature" iceberg.

God forgive us.

Please.

Democratic Election Results....

Let me continue my normal adolescent, reactionary political comments here.

Happy Dance. Oh, Happy Dance. (You REALLY don't want to see that.)

Susan Gwinn lost her badly conceived bid for Athens County Prosecutor.

She entered the race for obviously wrong reasons and ran the race in even more obviously wrong ways.

Level heads prevailed -- for once.

Most Ignorant Endorsement Ever...?

Sometimes an editorial statement can be made simply through selection.

Terry Smith scored a knockout in Monday's Letters-to-Editor segment of the Athens News. And he did it without writing a single word. Not one! ("No, not one. No, not one." 'scuse me, got all hymnal on ya.).

All he did was approve this letter; possibly the most ignorant endorsement ever:

Letter: Gwinn, with all her experience, deserves any office she wants

"Susan Gwinn has proven herself to be a uniter, not a divider.
She not only opened the Democratic Party to all; she’s devoted her life to it. Gwinn deserves whatever office she chooses."


Dear Obama, help us. I'm not sure I can delve the depths of this deepness.

Ok... I'm a uniter, not a divider (I am, yes I am. Just check my bonafides. No, those are my boxers.), and I've spent my whole life in service to others -- and beer.

The office I choose is... "King of the World".

See, because I deserve it.