The Lion and the Ox: The Winter of Our Discontent
Info coming at us at the speed of light—gigabytes per nano-sec—and our horse-and-buggy bio-chem brains struggle with ancient grammars, syntaxes and texts! Even our metaphors are now wretchedly overwrought: Not, “how to connect the dots,” but how to perceive, measure, record and duck the shot-gunned info-pellets rushing at our faces! No wonder the world has gone gaga—not Lady!—for predictions! “The world is too much with us,” so maybe those Mayan calendrical types knew a thing or two. Maybe Nostradamus. Maybe Cayce. Somebody must know something!
Last decade, in September, ‘07, I posted a piece called “Can the Left and Right Unite?” That was long before President “Hopey-Changey” had risen on his rhetorical pinions just long enough to foist on the gullible–one of the best bait-and-switch” acts in U.S. political history. It was a year before the Lehman Brothers “Great Recession” began; before TARP; before Europe’s implosion; before Tahrir Square; before the B.P. and Fukushima disasters; before the Tea Party and Occupy Movements; before Bin Laden’s and Saddam’s and Kim’s and Gaddafi’s demise, and Representative Giffords’ near-demise; before the Supreme Court sanctified corporate, financial, electoral control; before the National Defense Authorization Act, etc.!
Four years ago, the chief divisions in the country had to do with prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and most Americans were united in thinking “terrorists” the enemy, but not sure how to get them. Nobody had declared the American homeland a “battlefield” in the War on Terror—with all the ominous implications of such a designation.
Now, the war in Afghanistan slogs on, and the shadow of our wars in Mesopotamia will haunt us through the ages. The possibility of war with Iran is a warmonger’s wet-dream now—and the sheets are gross and soggy. Now, perhaps, it can begin to be said and heard: It was Bushwhackian, Rumsfeldian, Cheney-Reese and Powellesque, Pearle and Wolfowitz idiocy to attack Iraq; and our heedless diversion and waste of resources has helped to bankrupt us financially and morally. We’ve continued to hammer, frack and bomb our egg of a planet and now we’re dancing on a thin eggshell—and we’re mostly tap-dancing alone, not waltzing with a willing partner.
Square D Overloads - News
The Company will evaluate these novel peptides as potential therapeutics for the treatment of beta thalassemia and other diseases associated with iron overload. Coincident with the signing of this option agreement the company has also obtained funding
Last January, we probably should have been trying to detox from holiday cookie overload. But push away dessert forever? Sorry. No can do. Instead of declaring a war on sweets, we went to Berri Yummi Frozen Yogurt, a fro-yo shop owned by Lyman and
By Gary Brown I'm sort of working on a holiday overload right now. Two down, one to go. Every year “the holidays” seem a holiday too many. Christmas and New's Year's come within a week of each other. Thanksgiving and Christmas are only a month apart.
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As we spin out of whirligig 2011 into the free-fall gravity of 2012, about information-overload, we may cry out with Job, “Where is the place of understanding? Where is wisdom to be found?” The US has done some terrible things in this world and some