Any Wonder We Fret

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Considered anew: 
does your "culture" respect you? 

Not when you've checked the details! 

Consider how it threatens you... 

...condemns you once you've "failed."

.

Consider this but tyranny's 

convenience, if you please... 

Not happy 'till you're brought to heel 

and bruising up your knees...

.

Don’t consider this required, friend— 

a "condition of necessity"! 

This disrespect from leadership? 

Their weaponized casuistry? 

.
Their "living well" upon the least 

while shining people on? 

This is profiting from human misery... 

...and, ever, clearly wrong.

.

...And know they get away with it...
...will not be brought to bear!
And know they're hiding *stuff* in spots—
  yon, hither, here and there!
.
Yes, know its raison d'être
is an echo of the past,
when Kings and Priests ruled jealously;
not well ... but still, in fact.

.

"What's this to do with UFO's,"
the para-nazis ask!
Rather, who controls our "blinders,"
*covers up*— performs that task?
.
Who decides the subterfuge?
Who decides what hides?
Who's it sets the tone for shame;
who sullies and derides?

.

Who's it puts a TЯUMPIE's tongue...
so firmly up orange ass?
Who's it touts *religion*?
Who's passing all that gas?
.
Who's the one who dictates 
just how much you're going to "pay"?
Who decides design that fails;
who complicates your day?

.

Would you have a billion dollars
if some people went without?
Would you live in castled mountains
if your "pleasures" caused "the rout"? 
.
Would you give your stuck-up children
birthday parties costing millions,
if that insured the suffering
of the sick and shoeless billions?

.

...Deny our "mass salvation" 
to continue like a *god*
... it's roads to hell for innocents
enjoined to "take your rod"?
.
Would you drive a family homeless
owning million-dollar cars?
Would you trade your guilt for riches
if it kept us from the stars?
.
Would you wallow in your excess
like the privileged and elite
while knowing you're the cause of people 
living on the street?

.

We’re fretting that the *aliens* 
are here with cruel agendas?
No, we’re fretting 'cause we know, you see,
that we're our worst offenders!
.
We’re fretting that we're found out.
We’re fretting "jealous" Gods.
We’re fretting that "reality" may poke,
or jam and prod.
.
We’re fretting that our ill-got gain 
—on which we're now dependant—
is snatched away from clutching hands
 which drip with blood! Comprende?

.

Any wonder that we're lonely, yes,
a little sick at heart,
and feeling rather ready 
for a better... second start?
.
Any wonder why we're slighted
by those "lights" that crawl the sky?
Any wonder that the space folk 
won't *come out* and tell us "Why"?
.
Any wonder why they're shifting
in the dark behind the clouds...
Any wonder that they fear us...
when we give them cause! Here's how:

.

Why would they really fear us?
Well, we show no self-restraint!
Why should they really fear us?
We stress our planet faint!

.

Why should they really fear us
when our own we disadvantage,
so consistent when we screw each other
over for *percentage*...

.

Why should they really fear us?
We breed like squalid flies!
So many that it matters not 
that thousands starve and die...

.

It's us in need of changing,

not the *other* or the "grey."
It's us who needs the "oil change,"
it's us to save our day.
.
It's us who needs to grow up.
It's us who needs to try.
It's us who needs to shed our scales...
...no! Tear them from our eyes!!! 

• lehmberg2002@gmail.com
• http://www.alienview.net/

...Something... Would Seem To Loom!

.

"...alien enough to be psychologically unreachable,
communicationally intractable,
even existentially unspeakable..."

...Something... 
Would Seem To Loom!
by Alfred Lehmberg

Upcoming? Just a few historical last century news items, printed bon-motts of some bizarre if justified civil histrionics, histrionics about which the mainstream has had plenty of time to be, well, wholly forthcoming. Yes. Yes they have.

All of the proceeding were perfect opportunities for said mainstream to actually have been a mainstream, one finds. This would be a mainstream we'd LIKE to define as a reflection of some golden communicational mean, a cherished if conjectured core of trusted journalistic rationality and cooler logic... a poised (trust worthy!) official record... a social foundation for hearth and home going forward? Why not? Don't we deserve a measure of societal straitness?

Still, a steadier so more authoritative secular support is demanded on hand, more than there is presently for most of us, anyway. The sectarian would seem to bugger us unconscionably, unendingly, and would thusly disqualify itself comprehensively for cause and of needs... contrarily, a saner framework upon which to build is reflected upon, reader... for far too few individuals, given what we're to regard here in a moment, on much too small a planet! ...Consider the players in the debate on climate change, for example. What bespeaks "smart" and what's done stupid, so stupid, as to have now had its decided and disastrous run?

...A David Attenborough themed documentary regarding a well-executed pedagogical treatment on the learned mechanics of a sane civil-social discourse seems required and would be a good illustration of that wished-for civilizational efficacy here described. Would that we actually had one to watch...

...But, no. We're a facile humanity of despairing egos inefficaciously applied to our artistic potentials! We metaphorically rob Peter to pay Paul, moreover, and then disingenuously blame Paul to Peter, denying Christ in the process... but completely ignoring that strange lesson of a "doubting" Thomas, and Christ rewarding his respected doubt of an inexplicable "resurrection" with the offer to handle Christ's wounds, directly, as proof it was He!  Now, that's a REAL investment in position!

See, Truth is not fragile and can TAKE an abusive handling, is the lesson. We would put our hands into Christ's wounds and check their very verity! See, I but stand on the shoulders of giants as any of us can... and report: we are as strong as that! 

...Or could be...

What follows, then, are some intractable foreshadowings of the looming void extant. This is a void yawning wide the gaping depths of our shared times, our surface areas, trammeled and NOT... We wander its convoluted volumes and its surreal conjectured inner and outer spaces of fractal math... what must lie there waiting in the dark. What fresh hell or heaven's reward?

All hubris withers in its presence; however, and one's arrogance, vanity, or egotism become ludicrous and irrelevant in its gaze. The easily wounded or unsettled might avoid the exercise... Be forewarned!

See, its cloying ephemerality is too suggestive of those weird and unsettling intimations of seeming madness, intimations of a nature describing a wholly eerie and destabilizing "unknown" unknown... likely alien enough to be unreachable, communicationally intractable, even unspeakable...

Good news. Anything else would bore to tears!

Yeah, we'll "stumble" to "fall" and our brains may "liquefy" to run from ruined ears initially... ...we'll burn ourselves on a cosmic "stove" and cut ourselves on something in its "knife drawer," but we'll measure up adequately, even burned and minus some fingers, eventually, when what's said is done. It's what we do!

We better! A fractal existential reality of self-aware bits of intelligence are all but guaranteed by our own existence in the corporeal "all," as nothing happens but once in its confines, reader! 

Happened, happens! We happened! Others, then, MUST! It occurs to this writer that this may be all the best argument against a "monotheism" (like Christianity, Islam, or Judaism) one needs! 

Only one of anything must be the only wholly baseless myth. If there's one god then there is just going to be a plethora and pantheon of them! That's the physics. 

We only perceive a "singularity" anywhere, about anything, because we'd hope to be singular. Yet, nothing seems to have that singularity. Nothing we don't have to take on "faith," anyway...

See, it's more than likely that we're neither first on the universal scene (our closest stellar neighbor is a billion years older...) or the most talented and accomplished extant within it. The very idea of humanity as the universe's preeminent entelechy is ludicrous! The reader must agree out of the simple good sense of humility.

Verily, it's Humility dictating we make this presumption. Assumption, even, in this regard, is not uncalled for. Safer... and much less potential for humiliation. 

It's why pride goes before an inevitable fall... especially after struttin' around like some kind of landed princely popinjay or generally showin' your existential ass like we have for centuries! A percussive cap is invariably busted off into just such as ass just to satisfy karma, eh? 

Questions are effusively begged. Answers become a meaningless jumbled flotsam even factually credible, one discovers, as a well-facilitated "information void" allows a "corrosive chaff" sucked in with the abhorred vacuum of "unverified factual," ...and in that stupid mix? The honestly factual is invalidated  for "fake news."  

Remains... answers need not be sought... where they can be faced! Face them here:

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The unidentified craft appeared to take efficient controlled evasive action.
--FBI Memo, describing chase of UFO over the North Sea, 1947.
█
Before we could do any more, the Army, after conferring with [U.S.] officials, ordered the investigation stopped.
--Dr. Paul Santorini, on UFOs over Greece in 1946.
█
The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted ... lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled ...
--General Nathan Twining, Head of Air Material Command (AMC), 1947.
█
I was called one afternoon [in 1948] to come to the Oval Office – the President wanted to see me... I was directed to report quarterly to the President after consulting with Central Intelligence people, as to whether or not any UFO incidents received by them could be considered as having any strategic threatening implications ....
--General Robert B. Landry, Air Force Aide to President Harry S. Truman.
█
From their questions, I could tell they had a good idea of what the saucers are. One officer admitted they did, but he wouldn't say any more.
--Commercial pilot, after questioning by intelligence officer, 1950.
█
Army intelligence has recently said that the matter of ‘Unidentified Aircraft' or ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,' otherwise known as ‘Flying Discs,' ‘Flying Saucers,' and ‘Balls of Fire,' is considered top secret by intelligence officers of both the Army and the Air Forces.
--1949 FBI memo on UFOs.
█
Information is desired if this was some new or experimental aircraft or for any explanation whatsoever.
--1949 CIA memo.
█
[Object] described as flat on top and bottom and appearing from a front view to have round edges and slightly beveled ... No vapor trails or exhaust or visible means of propulsion. Described as traveling at tremendous speed... Pilot considered by associates to be highly reliable, of mature judgment and a creditable observer.
--Air Force intelligence report, following UFO sighting by F-51 pilot, 1951.
█
...some propulsion method not in the physics books.
--Scientist who witnessed a UFO in 1952.
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For six hours ... there were at least ten unidentifiable objects moving above Washington. They were not ordinary aircraft.
--Senior Air Traffic Controller for the CAA, Harry G. Barnes, 1952.
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Based on my experience in fighter tactics, it is my opinion that the object was controlled by something having visual contact with us. The power and acceleration were beyond the capability of any known U.S. aircraft.
--F-94 pilot, after encountering a UFO, 1952.
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In view of the wide interest within the Agency ... outside knowledge of Agency interest in Flying Saucers carries the risk of making the problem even more serious in the public mind than it already is.
--CIA memo, 1952
█
It was silvery in color, had a bun-shaped top, a flange-like two saucers in the middle and a bun underneath, and could not have been far off because it overlapped my windscreen!
--RAF fighter pilot, 1954.
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…Maximum security exists concerning the subject of UFOs.
--CIA Director Allen Dulles, 1955.
█
Some military officials are seriously considering the possibility of interplanetary ships.
--FBI memo on UFOs, 1952.
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Pilots of helicopters wished to stress fact that object was of a saucer-like nature, was stationary at 2000 ft. And would be glad to be called upon to verify any statements and act as witness.
--Emergency Report from Maxwell Air Force Base on air space violation by UFO, 1954.
█
I have discussed this matter with the affected agencies of the government, and they are of the opinion that it is not wise to publicize this matter at this time.
--Senator Richard Russell, head of Senate Armed Services Committee, regarding his sighting of a UFO during a 1955 trip to the Soviet Union.
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What bothers me is what's happening to our aircraft.
--Anonymous Air Force officer, 1955.
█
The Air Defense Command in Baton Rouge was on the phone, waiting for our report, when we landed there.
--Commercial pilot following a UFO sighting, 1957.
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Saucers exist (I saw two). They were intelligently flown or operated (evasive tactics, formation flight, hovering). They were mechanisms, not United States weapons, nor Russian. I presume they are extraterrestrial.
--Lt. Colonel Richard Headrick, radar bombing expert, 1959
█
Reliable reports indicate there are objects coming into our atmosphere at very high speeds and controlled by thinking intelligence.
--Navy Admiral Delmar Fahrney, public statement, 1957.
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Congressional investigations ... are still being held on the problem of unidentified flying objects and the problem is one in which there is quite a bit of interest... Since most of the material presented to the Committees is classified, the hearings are never printed.
--Congressman William H. Ayres, 1958
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Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.
--Former CIA Director, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, public statement, 1960.
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When the team was about ten miles from the landing site, static disrupted radio contact with them. Five to eight minutes later the glow diminished, and the UFO took off. Another UFO was visually sighted and confirmed by radar.
--Classified report by an Air Force Strike Team at Minot AFB, 1966.
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... reliable, but off the record information from the Pease AFB in Portsmouth, indicates frequent radar blips and fighters are constantly scrambled to pursue these objects.
--Journalist John Fuller, 1965.
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I think there may be substance in some of these reports ... I believe the American people are entitled to a more thorough explanation than has been given them by the Air Force to date.
--Congressman Gerald R. Ford, March 1966.
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If 'they' discover you, it is an old but hardly invalid rule of thumb, 'they' are your technological superiors.
--National Security Analyst, Lambros Callimahos, 1968.
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My own present opinion, based on two years of careful study, is that UFOs are probably extraterrestrial devices engaged in something that might very tentatively be termed 'surveillance'.
--Dr. James McDonald before Congress, 1968.
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...All of the preceding are frozen moments in our ufological past and, collected together, become a largely unimpeachable indication regarding the actuality of some larger reality... some grand physical existence from which we are being, very suspiciously, "protected" by a here-to-fore conflicted, corrupted, and now very likely criminal mainstream.

Somebody knows. Read on.

Restore John Ford.

Consciousness On Call...

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Oh my stars and little sputniks, 

but there's water on the moon! 

I hope this means a "lunar rush," 

and I hope it means it's soon! 

A boon to our economy, 

it could save us from the "Rock"; 

let's gird our loins for future's sake; 

own up and buy some stock!

Our destiny is manifest— 

to live upon new worlds. 

We crawled from slimy seas at first, 

progressiveness our herald. 

'Twas then we gulped our first clean air— 

now it's vacuum we're to breathe! 

We'll step out into timeless space— 

let's do it! Ready? HEAVE!

...

I cannot know the course you take; 

progressives take one now! 

There's potential, wondrous bounty, 

resting off the port-side bow. 

I'm setting sail, the winds are sweet, 

our canvases are filled; 

we're looming on prosperity; 

it's in space we'll be fulfilled!

And think of all the upsides— 

no natives to subvert! 

A planet of unclaimed dead space; 

no one to shame or hurt! 

Low gravity to play in, 

rare metals to refine, 

and toxic crap to stay in places 

safe, secure... confined! 

We'll sleep well snug from vacuum, 

and we'll farm the lunar soil; 

we'll mine that precious water— 

satisfactions for our toil.

We'd do it now! Why would we wait 

when every second counts! 

Where's our profit in delay? 

All our pressures strain and mount! 

Procrastinate at peril, 

ignore this carrot on a stick? 

Our *watchers* will conclude, perhaps, 

that we're as thick as bricks!

Water on the moon, my friends, 

water on the moon! 

It's enough to make you wobbly; 

it's enough to make you swoon! 

It's enough to make you wishful that 

perhaps there is a chance 

that we might even have hope left... 

In space, to sing our dance.

We owe it to ourselves, you see, 

and generations after! 

This cosmic plan whose time is come! 

Let’s shout it from the rafters! 

Our Earth is drowned in toxic sludge. 

We suffocate to death! 

Let’s take our leap to starry space...

...Now, while we have breath!

• lehmberg2002@gmail.com
• http://www.alienview.net/

• Make it so! If I was Bill Gates, I'd pay for it myself.
•  
• …Or would I... ...Could I?
•  
• Back last Century? Bill Gates gushed inspiringly with regards to his plans to put up a globe-circling string of low orbit communication satellites... This would shotgun into existence an internet without the limitations presently endured or otherwise threatened. A real first category level civilization attribute. 
• 
  
• Full-on real-time communication... Instant, effortless, and responsive... anywhere on the planet... anyplace where a dime-sized camera could go... ...from the bottom of any sea to the top any mountain, then on into space... anywhere a camera or a microphone could be included at the best resolution of either... fast enough to download a full-length feature film in milli-seconds... 
• 
  
• ...Gives a person grand ideas doesn’t it? World consciousness, on-call...
•  
• Maybe that was the problem... cue an ominous music.
•  
• You know, if you had... say... 50 billion dollars, after taxes, and you could spend less than a fifth of that to produce something similar? Would you? That is to say, could you? ...Would you be allowed?
•  
• You see... that bravely inspiring talk of 21st Century Communication Systems dried up overnight, and any reference to them abruptly disappeared from the media. Questions are suggested, reader, where they're not begged!
•  
• I wonder... was Mr. Gates *honored* with an authoritative visit by our stealthy authoritarians? Was he subject to some late-night visit of corporate media Czars or government *agency* boys? Maybe he was shown a cut of the Kennedy assassination from an angle no one had seen before... Beside the point... his brave talk about putting this planet in touch with itself evaporated like the porch light shot out by someone too suddenly wishing your attentions were... elsewhere... eh?
•  
• ...Keep a billion, Bill, to start your traditionally corrupt personal dynasty [g]. ...Though, the rest should go to the moon! C'mon, no one should sit on double-digit billions of dollars, dude, even when it's the law of the land!  It’s unethical, immoral, and just plain wrong. Wrong to a level of grok-ness as wide as it is long and as deep as it is unnecessary.
•  
• What happened to your plan, Bill?  
• 
  
• Hey? ...Did you know you were biologically compelled to eat less, and also potentially live a lot longer on the moon? Besides, wouldn’t it be kind of neat to have the 21st Century be able to fly back down to you, you know, if Earth got whacked by the aforementioned "Rock"?
•  
• I suspect it would... Something about placing eggs in different baskets, I recall...
•  Restore John Ford! Now.

To Which Flesh Is Heir...

I've had some significant oral surgery... it puts me a little overdrawn at my muse's idiosyncratic bank, currently. 

Production, spotty anyway, will be curtailed. I offer in the interim that the reader checking in first consider the work of Frank Feschino... and then move to restore John Ford, but read on.

Just Desserts

Just Desserts

by Alfred Lehmberg

The sad old man lay supine on a moldy cot in the allotted cold-water walk-up to which he'd been summarily, even rudely, assigned. He was lucky to get even that, he realized. Still, he was harboring an aggrieved misery not understood in an age where the majority can still pay its bills. 

The reader discovers that the old man's possessions had been recently confiscated and his property seized. His savings were liquidated to cover inflated, largely felonious, medical costs. He thought he had provided for all this.  "All this" was... just to start.

He was the last one left.  His family and friends were all dead in the dread triad's trifecta of disease, euthanasia, and homicide. Human Existence had gone, and decidedly, south. 

His children were murdered noncombatants in the "Rain Forest Wars" of 2028. ...A brother, tragically, by his own hand in a final resignation of all futility when his family passed in a similar contention. Friends and acquaintances... some in ways defying description. Real blaze of "glory" acts of pathetic desperation and angry despair... patheticism on parade. 

His own wholly unheralded and totally unmourned death loomed as a preferable event to that which he'd witnessed with his own eyes, remembering the terrible loss of his own children... he was glad, now, they were gone... 

His "last grand act" would have saddled any survivors anyway—increasing their burden and eroding their own futures... as he had been burdened and eroded... Social Security and Medicare are well missed where employers were loathe to pay living wages in the first place... but that was for persons with futures... if they'd had any futures. ...No one did. No one had. No one would.  

The care of his own parents had taken a sizable chunk of a dire discretionary income, and they had been "prepared," too. His wife was recently fallen, expensively, to the latest airborne Ebola variant released from a violated Amazon, or she'd likely be with him now sharing the mandated and official Retirement Experience. She'd still had a year to go at 70, but the old man bet she would have elected to go out with him. He would if she'd been the first...

The Retirement Experience was a Government program of forced termination. Sugarcoating is always disingenuous.

It was rumored to be something similar to what Edward G. Robinson experienced in Soylent Green... A drugged reverie regarding a glorious remembrance of what colorfully "was"... flowers, VR mountainous blue skies, blue seas filled with fish and splashing dolphins... the forgotten odors of lilac and sandalwood... only, Robinson's was voluntary. 

...If you turned yourself in they were more gentle. If they had to come for you it would go hard...  

In a few days, to be clear, he was slated for termination in that mandated program of "Geriatric Renewal." That was the program's "people-friendly" think-tank designation. At 71 He would dutifully surrender himself—would then be summarily plowed back into the expiring soil... after being squeezed of every asset. The now significantly well-dwindled 1% could still pay to be kept alive in whatever comfort there was remaining... Life was still precious for the few behind the gates... 

...There was talk of lowering the "Geriatric Renewal" age to 65...

           

It was late in a soiled and sordid year of 2042, and the weight of those years bore down with a crushing inevitability on the lonely old man.  The weight of that burden (which may be a future) is unendurable, insidious, and tragic in its avoidability.  ...And it was, he thought to himself, so avoidable.  "Stupid" usually is.

The life that afflicted him now was a condition that he, and others like him, had thoughtlessly created themselves, he'd slowly come to realize. He'd helped, astonishingly, to engineer a crisis of biblical proportion in his last quarter-century... was his dawning new thought. 

Subsequently? His "activity" or lack of same would help to inaudibly pop the hubristic bubble that was an arrogant humankind like it was an oily sandwich bag crushed heavily under-wheel at the ever-growing toxic land-fill. Humankind would be equally inaudible.

Overpopulation and its hard-case relatives Economic Collapse and Environmental Catastrophe... ...these would deliver a knockout blow to the weak chin of a consummately disappointing, underperforming, and slack-jawed humankind.  Finally, life had become too much to bear because the old man, he realized in the cruel winter of his winter, had helped make it too much to be borne. There's one for the stomach's pit! 

Early in the twentieth-century humankind began to profligate itself into all corners of the available existential planetary environment like hordes of clever, if self-loathing, locusts. It couldn't be told from space by your conjectured garden-variety ET as anything apart from a fungal infection or crass viral infestation. Such was humanity.

Heedless and insentient expansion. Mindlessness. Glutonies and overindulgences.  No thought about the consequences. Zero. Zip. Nada. Bupkis. One would think self-aware sentience would know better. We didn't.

The old man was reminded of dated television documentaries featuring breeding pairs of mice allowed to reproduce without limit into a large cage... food, water, and sewage not an issue.   The mice reacted to its overcrowdedness in what was ultimately a disturbing and unnatural manic indifference to their squalidly packed existences. Inexplicable and horrific physical outbreaks of violence were perpetrated on one another. Rat psychotics and rat psychopaths abounded doing rat psychopathic and rat psychotic things... Unconscionable acts upon one another, then readily expressed without explanation or logic, so unreservedly! That's overpopulation.  

So went humankind. Respect for privacy and public safety was an early casualty.  Vicious strangers dragged he and his wife from their home, on a couple of occasions. They were beaten savagely and made then to watch as their possessions were passed around to grasping dirty hands or destroyed out of cussedness. One almost got used to this.

Calling "police" was an exercise in futility. Their hands were full guarding the gates at the gated communities. The Gangs controlled huge sections of major cities, now, splattering the countryside with blood and neon ultra-violence, countries unto themselves.  Food was rationed in lines seemingly unending. At least the rats had food and water...

Rolling electrical brownout was a twenty-four-hour occurrence, but the straight-up outage of grid-death was more likely.  Speaking of the dead, they would lay stacked in forlorn piles covered with a few inches of septic earth until "processing." Maybe Soylent Green was real...

There was more than a dalliance into cannibalism by people he knew (the details are difficult to dwell on); more than once he had been tempted to try it himself...  He'd been able to refrain...

Too, insult on top of injury, the old man reflected that his horror was shockingly unnecessary.  The smallest amount of educational effort could have reversed this trend to insentient overpopulation, and he might more likely be living in a comparative Eden he mused forlornly. All was lost when Ronald Reagan made it possible to knowingly lie on public airwaves without consequence. 

Fascist Authoritarianism had certainly had its run and here he was!  There could have been at least an attempt to do the sensical. What was bad about "Democratic Socialism," again? Sanity, always within reach, somehow evaded grasp. 

Overpopulation hastened an economic collapse that would have occurred anyway.  The later part of the twentieth century was witness to seeing successive generations of undereducated people who redefined slothful detachment to a less than constructive art form.  The old man lived to see fidelity, service, and commitment to excellence as outdated virtues outliving usefulness. That's never been a good scene. 

At the last, he cursed bitterly the short-sighted and suicidal situation he selfishly made for himself and his doomed heirs. The fruits of it were, oh, so apparent.  Society devolved to a new predatory business ethic of ethicless corpocracy selling dangerous types of equipment blowing up on the road or bathing consumers with lethal radiations in the home.  

Rat tails and fingernails were tolerated in what "passed" for hamburger. Bank frauds and contractual abuses of all kinds wasted the innocence and increased the criminal guile of a humankind ready to ride a devil's shirttail into and reawoken racism and sexual bigotry. 

Attractive rumor was preferred outright to the more productive if less attractive but cited factual reality. Truth was no longer said to have beauty.   

He and the rest of his slothful generation betrayed the efficacy of "doing your own thing," as members of the self-involved "me generation," in mendacious "laid back" decades seeing neither point nor requitement in "unrewarded" exercise. Steadily, instead, it squandered the fiscal and emotional savings of the aggrieved aggregate planet to satisfy what would prove to be only mendacious "me" moments on the subject of personal futility and social meaninglessness. Prufrock in regretful expiration.

...Our spaceship Earth was disintegrating to a dying slum-ship officiated by psychopathic swine. ...And then climate science was proved spot on.

The procrastinating spend-borrow-spend mentality, borrowing against an unknown future, was facilitated by psychopathic profiteers running the world debt up to a point where it just-could-not be paid. One is reminded why there were prohibitions on all loansharking et al, anyway! The collapse created a smoking landscape of psychotics and suicides leaving the more sane and courageous persons only holding the indebted bags of their fellows' rotten and inconsequent bones.  

Overnight, the United States had become a third rate pseudo-power, a laughing stock, and a liability to be cashiered before all value was lost. Banks were overrun and trampled. Remains, this fiscal hell could have been avoided for pennies a day if humans had started soon enough—as late as 2020. Only, they'd let that be their last failure.

Overpopulation hastened the final ecological crisis to an inevitable conclusion. Environmental abuse turned major slashes of the fragile planet into steaming, virulent, and open cisterns of disease-releasing ice melts and tundra thaws. Toxic waste and micro-plastic eventually killed the oceans outright, so it was only a matter of time until the rest of the planet began to falter in a faster and more agonizing fashion.  

Babies of all kinds (human and animal) were born misshapen and grotesque, or dead where they were born at all.  Barely potable water was more precious than an equal volume of substandard foodstuffs, it would come to pass. He was always thirsty. Urine drinking was common.  

The myriad colors green disappeared with other examples of natural color; all that remained were washed out browns and diseased dirty grays.  

Humankind had been injecting agro-poisons deeply into the ecosystems of the planet for decades, rendering them now sterile and uninhabitable.  There would be no breath of life on the planet going forward. There would only be a pervading odor of the last forced breath of a long-dead corpse.  

There was no question about it.  Proud humankind spent its last decades defecating in bed and pushing it down with its feet.  It was almost laughable that the world had had obvious proof of the avoidable consequences of environmental inaction, early on, for a century even, but that complacent humanity could not make the smallest sacrifice to a future in the correction of these current existential horrors... for themselves or their children.    

The old man lay on a dirty cot, waited to go die, and wished fervently for a chance to live his broken life over.  Though, the solutions that he knew might have precluded this disaster were lost to an uncaring past. Ifs were like spilled milk... 

Spilling the inevitable "Ifs"... 

If he had at least voted with a sane if complacent majority to elect men and women to Government more worried about doing the job than getting elected to do it, the misery could have been avoided.  If he had voted to tax more of wages of the moderately affluent (and up) for Social Security, or if he had campaigned against the concept of prevaricating "right to work" laws, then perhaps there would have been some money to pay off the huge debts that he had helped to incur.  If he had supported measures to reform the Health Care System or encouraged Corporate America to end fascistic and predatory discrimination practices, the situation would be more bearable. If we had held that bastard tool of psychotic corpocracy, TЯUMP (that beginning of the end), to his empty promises as the Education President et al (Chosen of God and loved by Israel!), or supported other measures to enliven the educational infrastructure (much less the physical National one!), we might not be in this sorriest of sorry, sorry states.  If we had taken better care of ourselves physically, or exercised, or eaten more intelligently, perhaps we could have evaded the liabilities of poor health or had a system addressing them... preferring disease cure to disease management... If. If. If.

If ifs and buts were cake and nuts... 

One more. If he had not been one of the self-serving, short-term-solution sycophants... a cretinous consumer-monster no better than any when it's dealt out... he could have contributed to a living World.  Instead, he was a symbol of its failure and on the blame line for its demise.  

Imagine knowing at the end, then, like the old man above, that yours was not a symbiotic relationship you had had with your Nation, or with your planet. ...Not remotely.

No... There was only one word that would describe that brand of contribution.  That word was... parasite, and their desserts are just.

Of Presidents and Popes...

How many flavors does time have...
What provokes them?

.,¸¸,.»§«,¸¸,.·´¯`·.,¸¸,.»§«*¥*»§«,¸¸,.·´¯`·.,¸¸,.»§«·.,¸¸,.

I've been looking through the Hubble; 

so, I'll make this terse account. 

I've wandered distant galaxies, 

traveled time ... I've been about. 

I've been going where we all can go; 

the kingdom's here at hand, 

too, it just may be we breath upon concrescence!  

Understand?

It's larger than we could have thought 

—expanding as we speak— 

its edge beyond the limits 

of the places we can seek. 

It just goes on and on 
in this ...glorious... expanse... 

swirling frozen fire 
kissing prepossessing chance.

It doesn't stop with rainbows, friend 

but descends to infra-red; 

its paint then ultra-violet, 

on to x-rays (yes!), instead! 

Its pressures are incredible, 

and then pressure's less than mist!  

You'd be shredded to your neutrons, 

yes, or say you'd just been kissed...

In that space and time and distance? 

There are persons being born. 

Why, with just one race per galaxy, 

there are thousands, billions—more! 

See? Thus contrives the multi-verse! 

...We're what it, then, makes up: 

To provide for insight on itself!  

...Drink deeply from that cup!

It is good... and passing bad, 

or indifferent, then, as hell! 

It wallows in the foulest slimes; 

or, it's ringing sterile bells. 

Sometimes it is a blessing! 

Sometimes it is a curse... 

it could be said it's much like us. 

That's for better. 

That's for worse.

We have a million neighbors, then; 

we've never been alone. 

Some wait outside the *front doors* 

of our squalid little homes. 

Some wait with plates of *brownies*, 

and some others wait, *without*. 

Some wonder when we'll open doors... 

and bravely walk on out!

They wonder why we linger 

when the truth ... it must be plain. 

We must come out! Like whitewash runs 

from fences in the rain.

...And we'll all feel so damned foolish, 

and we'll hang our heads in sorrow... 

that we wasted all this precious time 

denying our tomorrows.

].,¸¸,.»§«,¸¸,.·´¯`·.,¸¸,.»§«***»§«,¸¸,.·´¯`·.,¸¸,.»§«·.,¸¸,.[

I've been looking through the Hubble...

 and it's hard to get excited 
by the struggle and travail of human beings. 

I've just come back from timelessness... 

all spaciousness...

—vast distances—

no "common sense" conceives it in its dreams.

I've wandered where the black holes 

and the hypernovas are, 

so I can't "arouse" for ignorant delay. 

That comes across so petty 

so unworthy of reflection, 

we're a race bereft of what would save our day.

...And remember fellow humans, 

when the *others* do appear, 

how we spent our time and effort, here on Earth. 

Did we short-sheet trusting brothers; 

did we denigrate our sisters, 

just to keep a spot we covet near some "hearth."

We thought we had our "reasons": 

they weren't the proper faith ... 

their color was... objectionable 

( we have this thing with "race"). 

...The other side lacks "proper towns... 

they didn't speak "our" language... 

the "sex" is too disturbing ... 

they were on a different bandwidth? 

They "didn't have no schoolin' "... 

they "weren't as blessed as me" 

...they were from another country, 

and, "by rights," were "bad"... you see?

Well—all that's pretty laughable 

when you're woke to extant truth... 

All those "pretty" little bigotries 
just dissolve 

and fall from view. 

See, at last, ...reality... 

that we never were alone! 

Embarrassment shades cheeks bright red, 

but shame will touch the bone.

• lehmberg2002@gmail.com
• http://www.alienview.net/

"Wherever you go; well, there you are."

• Meanwhile... Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Dr. Laura... et egregious al...or...what can happen to you when too many people hear you on the radio or TV... 
• 
  
• Power corrupts, absolute power... absolutely!  How does one keep their head?  To start: you don't believe the good reports about you, only be thankful for them.  If you're sincere you have to pay some attention to the negative criticism...
•  
• Oh... add those deplorable if "well-meaning" tea-baggers, freedom bangers, and "Never Trumpie" psycho-Saviors? ...These seemingly contrive for a complete discredit of Christianity's institution, a trifecta for a religion's invalidation. Burn their life boats!
• 
  
• Christianity... it's an institution forever "advantaged" by busy sociopaths and misogynists, anyway... ...but the aforementioned "trumpled" (sic) tea-baggers... ...make the discredit complete and worse, actually... ...Worse than your garden variety fundamentalist suicide-bombing Islam! That's true!
•  
• See, government-controlled by religion—Theocracy—is what you court with these Trumpian tea-baggers, their legislated morality: an authoritarian theocracy of the most turgid and smothering dogma-worship imaginable.  Real ...bug-in-the-ass up-tightsmanship... of that heavy, come-right-in-your-bedroom, caliber.  How's all that working out for the Arabs, anyway... ...proof of the cognitive infidelity of a "tea-bagged Pal-beckian" initiative because we all have a clear audit trail of the consequences of that wing-nut initiative, overseas!
•  
• Yes, then Christianity would be worse, you see, because their boosters have a ready example of a theocracy to appreciate in the news—such as it is—every day. Islam remains the child of Christianity, and the child the father to the man...
•  
• Consider the potentials of Presidents and Popes. The former is a spiritless-sock-puppet for inhuman and corrosively applied corporate interests unethically imposed as "fair and square, conservative, and of God." ...But no, his interests unabashedly and disingenuously use religion, shamelessly, on a wide, diligently uninformed, and trusting base... ...Use religion as a manipulative and unethical control mechanism, reader, so as to relieve that "base" of, not just their cash, but their birthrights, their civil rights and their rights to satisfaction and self-respect!  ...But. ...I. ...Sugarcoat.
• I'll know a tree by the fruit it produces, Sir and Madam.
•  
• The latter? He is much of the preceding. Plus... traditionally? Why, He protects the interests of pederasts and pedophiles in an unnaturally if allegedly celibate priesthood...reader... ...from that "trusting" base.
•  
• Outrage?
•  
• Yea and verily, and I say unto ye, my ufological brethren! [g]. Hey, keep one hand on your wallet and the other over your posterior pore! Be sensitive to unwarranted activity in either of those two locales...
•  
• 
  
  Restore John Ford.