And you thought that bureaucrats only covered their own rear ends!

Major trends do not always arise in the United States, Europe, or Japan. As the Southern Hemisphere gains influence, we can anticipate developments in warmer climates propagating northward like, for example, killer bees or the Bossa Nova. (Note to Younger Readers: the Bossa Nova was a Brazilian dance that entered the U.S. during the 1960s. It was executed to the sound of really excellent music, but rapidly lost traction to the elegant Mashed Potato.) Now, Dear Reader, we can look to Venezuela, the socialist paradise, for a truly remarkable precedent.

The government of Venezuela has announced that it is seizing control of a factory that produces toilet paper. The purported reason for this action is a profound shortage of rear-end-oriented products, including toilet paper, sanitary napkins, and disposable diapers. Further, the Venezuelans do not mess around – they have announced that they will execute the takeover not with legal orders, but with the army.

In our view, taking the position that the government will shoot people if they attempt to hijack bum products (note the bad pun) is a little much. On the other hand, it may be necessary in a country that does not generate all that many corn cobs.

But let us imagine that this approach is adopted by the gummint here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. The American Red Cross reports that blood supplies are dangerously low. Not to worry! Our masters can save us. Following the Venezuelan approach, they will deploy battle hardened troops to round up a likely group of donors (the current Administration probably prefers Republicans, although there is a school of thought on the left that maintains that Republicans have no hearts and accordingly have no blood), stick needles into them, and drain them dry.

And there are other shortages!

Physician deficit? Draft promising students and force them to go to medical school!

Ammunition shortage? Seize all plows and beat them into swords!

The possibilities are endless.

Hello again, Dear Reader, and please accept my apologies for my long absence. I was forced to squander my time on the ignoble pursuit of moolah, by actually working at my day job. But I have repented, and have returned to lighten your days once again with tales of imminent apocalypse.

It is not enough that the day of doom is being brought forward by the presence of drooling winos clogging our city streets and country roads, filling the gutters not only with themselves, but also with rivers of pee and barf. The rot has now spread to the kingdom of the lower animals. (Or maybe the higher animals; it depends on your point of view.) It has also taken root at the Antipodes, a region heretofore serving as a beacon of virtue, id est, Australia.

Nature World News, a tree-huggers’ rag with some credibility, reports that the real swine have now adopted humans’ decadent habits. Real swine, as in bacon on the hoof.  A party of innocent campers, seeking respite from the rigors of civilization at the Grey River rest area in the wilds of western Australia, were accosted by a drunken feral pig.

From a real Down Under perspective, being drunk, in and of itself, is not so bad. However, this pig committed an unpardonable sin: it stole eighteen (18) beers from the campers’ stash, slurped  them down, and did not offer to share.

In addition, the pig could not hold its liquor. It was a mean drunk. It picked a fight with a cow. It turns out that this was a bad decision since cows, after all, are a lot bigger than pigs. The drunken pig was last seen fleeing the cow’s righteous wrath by swimming across the river.

This incident bodes ill. It suggests that the beasties now possess tools, such as bottle openers and church keys. (If the beer was contained in pop-top cans, it also suggests that pigs have developed unaccustomed manual  dexterity.) It also suggests that as the beasts adopt our intoxicants, they are also adopting our worst behavior.

So what can we expect next? As the trend continues, we can anticipate hordes of coke-snorting kangaroos mugging passersby. We can anticipate a lone wolf wolf, stoked on antidepressants, perched on a rooftop with an AK47 bumping off total strangers. We can anticipate alienated teenage sheep invading schools with AR15’s.

There is no way to stop this descent into total chaos. If we try to curb this activity, we will be hamstrung by PETA and the ACLU. There is only one solution.

Eat more red meat.

So, Dear Reader, you thought that you had seen the worst of snooping by the powers that be (commercial and governmental), what with the NSA reading your e-mails, tapping your phone, reading over your shoulder from their keyhole satellites, tracking your cell phone, and collecting all your credit card transactions, did you? Believe me, these are mere peccadillos. The future is much more terrifying, thanks to the evil gnomes of Sky Deutschland. (Sky Deutschland is the Krautland branch of the Sky TV network.)

These folks noticed that many commuters, exhausted from a long day of shifting enormous piles of paper about, collecting inside information, and racing back and forth to the water cooler, plod aboard the train and rest their noggins against the window, hoping to catch a snooze before confronting their spouse and kiddies. “Vhat a vaste of time” thought the geniuses of their advertising department, “Zis time could be spent listening to COMMERCIALS!” And then they had an “ah-ha!” moment.  It occurred to them that it is possible to send sound waves through solid objects. So they and their tech provider have developed a device that drives the windows like little loudspeakers, so that, when you rest your head against the window, you hear a still, small voice inside your head, like the voice of God, transmitting any message the  fiends wish to transmit. Sort of like the description of what prophets experience. Or paranoid schizophrenics.

Our German friends have only crass commercial purposes in mind.  “Eat at Joe’s” is sort of innocuous, you may think. Wanna bet? How about a message like “Eat our hamburgers until you pass out or explode, whichever comes first!” It will contribute more to obesity than the non-stop sequences of fast food ads that punctuate every station break on the idiot box. No one will be able to say “no” when the voice of God tells them to visit McWeinerschnitzel’s seventeen times per week.

But it gets better! Being brainwashed into blimp-hood is one thing. But how long will it be until the gummint gets with the program? Not bloody long, believe me!

But this is great!

Once our masters can REALLY get inside our heads, perfection cannot be far away. The folks in power will now be able to hypnotize us into complete acquiescence with every stupid plan they concoct. We will march willingly to the beat of the perfect drummers in D.C.

Hey! We do that now! Uh oh.

We’re doomed! I’m not talking about the kind of doom we usually discuss, the collapse of cultural norms. No, Dear Reader, today we will discuss the “don’t start any long books” kind of doom.

A classic movie came out in 1956 called “Forbidden Planet.” True, it did have some tacky aspects. (My favorite line was “Any quantum mechanic worth his salt could fix that.”) It starred Walter Pigeon, Leslie Nielson, Ann Francis, and Robbie the Robot (who would later return as one of the stars of the horrible “Lost in Space” TV series.) The burden of the film was that the inhabitants of a distant planet had developed a machine that could instantly turn one’s thoughts into reality.  When the machine was turned on, it worked fine until the first night when everyone went to sleep. Unfortunately, the violent thoughts that everyone has, described in the film as “monsters from the id,” materialized and everyone was killed except Walter Pigeon and his daughter.

In 1956 this was ridiculous. But today?

Let me remind you of two recent technological developments. The first is video games operated by brain waves. Right now you can purchase a set of electrodes to strap on your noggin and play Pong without lifting  a finger. Admittedly, Pong is a pretty primitive video game. But great oak trees from little acorns grow. It will not be long before our teenage progeny will be able to play “Grand Theft Auto” and “Call of Duty” using their weird little brain waves. Now hold that thought.

The second development is computer-driven three-dimensional printing. The most popular application, at least as the press tells it, is the production of guns. The press, knaves that they are, almost never mention that the few times these devices have actually been fired they have blown up, which renders them somewhat less fearsome than the press and the FBI think. However, practice makes perfect, and soon we will be able to print out a functioning 150mm howitzer.

You see where this is going.

Fast forward a few years (or a few months, or a few days, perhaps.) The video game makers and the printer manufacturers will get together and release a thought-powered printer driver. And we Earthlings will play out the Forbidden Planet script for real.

Gives you a warm feeling, doesn’t it?

The topic of the day around the world is Edward Snowden. Is he a hero? Is he a traitor?

As usual, Dear Reader, he is both. When he tells us that our  masters are spying on US, he is a hero.  When he tells furriners that we are spying on THEM, he is a traitor.

Actually, there is a much more apt term for such a fellow. In a great film entitled “The Departed” about dueling double agents planted in the Boston Mob and the Massachusetts State Police, the closing scene shows a four-legged varmint scurrying along on the top of a brick wall. The varmint is a

RAT!

That’s the name for Mr. Snowden. Also stool pigeon, stoolie, fink, rat-fink. In civilized societies, such as the Mafia, Mr. Snowden would be buried up to his neck in excrement with a dead canary stuffed in his mouth as an object lesson to other would-be big mouths.

Do not misunderstand me – I am as appalled as you, Dear Reader, that our masters are in a position to spy on my every word, spoken or written. It is discouraging to find that all my paranoid fantasies aren’t paranoid fantasies after all.

But that doesn’t absolve Mr. Snowden. Just because you get the outcome you desire doesn’t mean that the person who got it for you is a good guy. After all, Mussolini made the trains run on time in Italy.

Snowden is dangerous and amoral. He didn’t only clue you in on what you already suspected was going on anyway (unless you were a naïve boob). He is also in the process of distributing critical information on how our spooks sneak up on folks who don’t like us very much to those very folks. If you think that’s in your interest, you are in error.

This latest disaster is a sure indicator of civilizational collapse. In the good old days, Western Civilization had a much better class of rat. Cassius was a serious player when he stuck Caesar. Benedict Arnold was a leading Revolutionary General. Klaus Fuchs, who gave the nuclear bomb designs to the Russkies, was a senior scientist at Los Alamos. The chief of counterintelligence for the CIA was working for the Russkies, too.

But what do we have now? Manning and Snowden, low level clerks and techies spilling their guts (and maybe ours too, unfortunately) to boost their Facebook followings.

But this is great!

Look, the greatest social scientists of the last century were not, contrary to what we old fogies were taught, Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead. No, no, no! They were Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol.

McLuhan, a Canadian sociology professor, figured out that we would all end up living in a global village. He just didn’t know it would be a digital village called the Web.  Warhol, a crazy painter who invented art as pictures of soup cans, observed that soon everybody in the world would be famous for fifteen minutes.

So now, we can bring the great ideas of these great visionaries to life! Loyalty is so passé’. We can get on the six o’clock news just by betraying whatever institution we belong to, and end up being lionized by the tastemakers. We will have free lunches and dinners forever! We will have earnest young ideologues begging to jump into the sack with us (which can occasionally be a benefit, except when they are the ones who wear thick glasses and don’t bathe much).

Doesn’t that sound like fun?