As you walk through one major airport in the Northeast, you will encounter a sign in the form of a yellow rhombus, on which is painted a bomb. Not a modern bomb; rather, it is an old fashioned kind of bomb: round, with a protruding sputtering fuse. A hundred years ago, anarchists, dressed in top hats and capes, sporting scruffy beards and shouting “Death to the Oppressors,” used to heave them at fashionable ladies. Sort of like today, except for the changes in headgear and slogans. Of course, the bomb is surrounded by a circle which is crossed by a slash,  like a “No Smoking” or “No Eating” or “No Spitting on the Grass” (just kidding, but I’d love to see the ideograph for THAT one) indicating, I suppose, that you should leave your bomb at home. It is typical of the ossified bureacracy of a collapsing civilization to think that this sign will provide us poor flyers with an added level of safety.

But there are some signs that are useful. For example, when you walk into a bar in Boston, you will be greeted with a yellow rectangular sign, printed in black block letters, that begins “WARNING.” This is a word that never gives me a good feeling. In the same typeface, the sign continues with a citation to the Massachusetts code that provides for your hanging, drawing, and quartering if you are apprehended drinking an adult beverage and are not yet of the legal age to become a disgustingly sloppy drunk. Well, the punishment is not quite that severe, but you get my drift.

The reason that this sign is so much fun is that, when you enter a bar in Austin, Texas, you will encounter a superficially similar sign. Once again, it is rectangular, yellow, printed in block letters, and starts with that same ominous “WARNING.” However, as you read the following text, you are disabused of the notion that Austin is like Boston, looking out for the morals of its youth. No no no! The text of the Austin sign informs you of the dire penalty if you bring your GUN into the bar. I never read far enough to get to the description of the penalty, but I suspect it involves your being shot. And if you disregard the sign, get into a dispute, and plug somebody, I also suspect that you will be acquitted when you say “Judge, he needed killin’.”

When you enter a restaurant in California, you are greeted by a sign, white this time, which informs you that everything served in this restaurant has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals. Bon appetit! The sign does not mention, of course, that the laboratory animal was a rat forced to eat a daily dose of twelve pounds of whatever chemical is the worry of the month before developing cancer, which occurred about ten milliseconds before its stomach exploded from the volume of stuff squirted into it.

It keeps getting better. McDonald’s, of “Super Size Me” fame, is now putting calorie counts on its placemats, and other purveyors of similar health foods are following suit.

In the not too distant future, we can expect the introduction of signs which are even more fun.

At the entrance to a hat shop: “The last guy to try on that hat probably had head lice.”

At the entrance to a power tool shop: “You don’t really need those fingers, do you?”

At the entrance to the doctor’s office: “Medical Malpractice Lawyer One Floor Up.”

and my personal favorite:

At the entrance to a by-the-hour motel: “If you sleep with her, it will fall off.”

Full disclosure is a beautiful thing.

I love the environment, I really do – the grass, the trees, the sky, the swamps, the deserts, the jungles, the caves filled with primal ooze, black widow spiders, rattlesnakes, great white sharks, cobras, tarantulas, lice, the Ebola virus, vancomycin-resistant tuberculosis, flesh-eating bacteria, volcanoes, meteorites, stellar explosions, all of it! I love Mother Earth, even though She spends about 99.8% of her time trying to annihilate me.

Worshiping nature is, of course, a hallmark of civilizational collapse, representing as it does the rejection of rational thought and all considerations of practicality. But I still love “green” technology.

It’s fun!

You know where the term “green” comes from? No, it’s not from the color of chlorophyll, the pigment that makes grass and leaves the color that filters down through the leaves in an aboriginal jungle (God bless evolution) and also makes your mouth smell fresh when it is included in mints. “Green” when applied to technology comes from the color of MONEY! That’s right, money! Green technology costs an arm and a leg. You love “green” if you own a “green technology” company, and have friends among environmentally conscious politicians (ask Al Gore).

Green technology also makes you feel good, because you are so environmentally responsible and are being kind to the bunnies, chipmunks, coyotes, and rats. As long as you don’t use it to heat your house. Because if you try to stay warm using photovoltaic cells, greenhouses, or any other environmentally conscious solar technology, you will freeze your ass off. Nobody who peddles these solar blessings ever mentions that, occasionally, the winter sky is cloudy. Like 95% of the time.

What will we do next for Mother Earth, or Gaia as the real nuts refer to her? You should plan to watch all new construction screech to a halt as more and more species get promoted to “endangered.” Or “threatened.” Or “less happy than we, the powers that be, think they should be.”

And vegetables are next. Remember the furbish lousewort? (I am not making this up) Preserving this pathetic weed stopped an important flood control project dead in its tracks in Maine. On the other hand, who cares about drowning a few moose? But there are weeds we do care about – for example, wheat. And the other vegetables. We must preserve their precious lives. Not one stalk shall be cut. Kumbayah, my Lord, Kumbayah!

And when we finish saving all the other species, we will still have one problem left. There will still be one endangered species.

Us.

No, I’m not talking about the Battle of Hastings. That’s 1066. I am talking about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, not rendering unto William the Conqueror everything you have.  I am talking about Form 1040, the one tool left to us poor mortals to claw back our money from the rapacious government that collected too much of it last year. Why do we overwithhold? Because the hordes of the Internal Revenue Service will descend on us if we are fifteen cents short and turn our lives into a living hell for the next twenty years. So we sit docilely by the mailbox, waiting for our refund check, and when it arrives we say “Oh Goody!”

You think Form 1040 is bad. Try Form 1120. That’s the form for a corporation’s tax return. By the time you finish completing that one, including all the required supplementary schedules, it is about the size of the Manhattan telephone directory. [N.B. For those of you who are young enough not to remember what a telephone directory is, let me explain. In the days BG (before Google), you found a telephone number by consulting a thick book which had the names of the owners of the telephone numbers arranged in alphabetical order. Since you’re reading this, I assume you know what an alphabetical listing is. As a predicate, I also assume that you know what an alphabet is.]

But back to the income tax. What a wonderful word is “tax!” It comes from the Ur-Proto-Ugaritic language spoken by the Australopithecans, and translates literally as “screw the peasants.” So you can see that nothing much has changed over the past several millenia.

But things are about to get even better. Our masters are about to impose a “carbon tax.” Unfortunately, it will not be paid by the carbons. It will be paid by YOU. As you can see by looking out the window and observing the absence of glaciers, the Earth is heating up, which will have all sorts of bad consequences, like increased agricultrual production that will encourage excessive eating, fatness, and an increase in heart attacks. And we all know that this heating is produced by the burning of stuff, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere, exacerbating the greenhouse effect. [For me, the greenhouse effect is my being inundated by hydroponically grown zucchini raised by my neighbor all through the winter.] To alleviate this problem, the gummint is going to charge emitters of CO2, like power companies and airlines, a fee based on how much CO2 they emit. This will result in electricity costs going from $.04 per kilowatt hour to $400.00 per kilowatt hour, and the coach fare from Boston to Miami going from $200 to $20,000. But what the hell.

We have much more fun in store.

What else produces CO2? Why you do, of course, every time you exhale! I’ll bet they tax that next, and if you don’t pay up, they will duct tape your nostrils closed on every second Tuesday.

And there are lots of other greenhouse gases! Say, like methane, produced, as you know from your diligent perusal of the newsfeeds, by cow farts. The methane tax cannot be imposed directly on the cows, because they are unlikely to pay. So the cost will be born by the rancher, and steak will be $1,000 per pound, like it is in Tokyo today. And if you, as a city dweller, don’t want to be assessed a similar tax, lay off the beans.

But do you know what the biggest greenhouse gas is? WATER VAPOR! So you can forget about taking any more hot showers, or washing your dishes in hot water. I’m sure you have a river bank located conveniently near your house.

But back to carbon. Carbon is a chemical element. There are 117 others. We can tax them too!

We’re just getting started.

There is an old joke that Illinois politicians serve two terms: one in the statehouse, and one in the slammer. It’s true everywhere, but Illinois is the poster child for crooked politicans. (But I repeat myself.) (In all honesty,  I have to admit that this construction is due to Mark Twain, only he used “member of Congress” and “idiot.”)

This raises a serious financial question. In a day of collapsing state finances, why should the people of Illinois have to pay for TWO residences for their felonious leaders? I want Illinois to prosper. I once lived in Chicago, and I love the city. It sure beats the hell out of New York. Chicago is clean.  It also has a beautiful lakefront, terrific museums, great restaurants, and pleasant people. In contrast, New York is filthy, has riverfronts that provide a wonderful view of (yuch) New Jersey, and vile people who scurry about in a manner indistinguishable from the gait of a cockroach.

So how is Illinois to regain financial stability. It is said that you can’t save yourself into success, you have to spend money to make money, etcetera, ad nauseum. But you sure can save yourself from bankruptcy and life sleeping on a grate covered with old copies of the Wall Street Journal. So I have a modest suggestion for reducing Illinois state expenditures.

Sell the statehouse to a real estate developer, and send the politicians directly to jail immediately upon their election.

This would be fun, and would clearly raise the quality of governance. Illinois politicians would be able to pass far fewer useless  laws if they had to meet in the prison library, since they would be forced to maintain silence. They couldn’t meet in the prison dining hall because they would also be required to remain silent during meals, just like their fellow felons. The only forum in which they wouild be allowed to speak would be the exercise yard, and if they shot their mouths off there, the  younger and stronger of their associates would, at best, beat them senseless, and at worst, stick them with a shiv.

It would also be impossible for them to extort material amounts of graft from paving contractors. We all know that graft raises the price of road maintenance, thus increasing your taxes. You might argue, of course, that all the paving contractors are also in jail for bid-rigging conspiracies, but new paving contractors spring up to fill the vacuum constantly, financed by organized crime, so roads on which to drive Belchfire Eights at 130 miles per hour will continue to be available.

Politicians would also be in a position to learn useful trades. Not making license plates! License plates, phooey! Their new associates could teach them safecracking, how to hotwire a car, drug distribution logistics, and all the other myriad skills that make a collapsing civilization go.

I love efficiency.

Two feet of snow. Before even one inch fell, our brave media christened this latest snowfall “The Blizzard of 2013.” In the 1800’s, people had the decency to wait until 1889 to christen the March 1888 snowstorm “The Blizzard of ’88.” But now, we need a dramatic label, preferably conjuring up images of hardy pioneers slogging on through fifty foot snowdrifts carrying 200 pound knapsacks and fighting off wolves.

In actuality, we’re weenies.

We sit inside, warm and full of scotch, watching the snowflakes fall. And all the while, we loudly pity ourselves because of the enormous hardship the storm is working on us, for example, by making it impossible for us to go out to buy pizza.

Whatever happened to the concept of the stiff upper lip? Robust civilizations celebrate the hardy and self-controlled. But as the civilization decays, poets waste their minuscule talents celebrating failure, bemoaning the fate of the incompetent, and gnashing their teeth at the injustice of anybody living well by working hard and making a buck. Diseases that used to be considered mild annoyances are promoted to plagues ; “The Hearbreak of Psoriasis;” “The Agony of Ingrown Toenails;” “The Plague of Big Mac Deprivation.”

All of which is really cool!

Whining is inherently fun, and it’s even more fun when other people listen to it uncritically! No matter what it is, we can let it all hang out. My foot hurts! My head hurts! My ass hurts! Gimme sympathy! None of this suffering in silence nonsense. What fun is that? We can damn well suffer at the top of our lungs, in the serene confidence that no one will say “Shut up, you crybaby!” “Crybaby” is a non-PC pejorative. The response you can bet the farm on is “Oh, you poor thing. Let me give you a hug.”

And you can generalize to things other than bodily discomforts. I want a bigger house! I want a cooler car! I  want to jump in the sack with Claudia Schiffer! I want all of your money!

The last one I like.