Thoughts on Secession in 2012

Dear Mr. President,

I understand that a number of folks in several states in our union are unhappy that you won reelection to the Presidency. These states have citizens who have signed petitions to secede from our nation’s union. I’d like to help you out here. The following is a suggestion for an address that you might offer to our nation on this topic. By all means, do feel free to have the folks in the black suits airdropped from black helicopters seize all television, cable, radio and Internet operating centers to ensure that each citizen in our citadel of freedom has the opportunity to watch, listen to and digest this message.

With Warm Regards and Unflinching Support,

Steven C. Solomon

To: President Barack Obama

Fr: SCS

Re: Go F^*k Off Texas

Dt: 11/15/2012

Please pass this on to your staff, Mr. President. I believe it is a dandy concept, at least a sketch of a speech that needs to be made.

“My fellow Americans, I interrupt this baseball game (Kathy Lee and Hoda, soap opera, idiots yammering on Fox News, etc and whatever) to bring you an important message. It has come to my attention that a number of folks in several states of America are sore about the fact that a guy with a funny name and is supposedly black or not and born in America or Kenya, is an atheist and Islamic, a transexual married to a man and a woman, and is a communist who wants to kill your grandmother is still President. Okay. That makes total sense. Nobody likes to lose a race of any kind. Now you want to secede from the United States of America

In any case, I will focus my remarks today on the state of Texas for the sake of simplicity. I understand that you folks in the red states require any help that I can provide in terms of focus and keeping things simple. I am, after all, the Chief Executive of Helping Explain the Obvious to Cranky Idiots. So, here goes!

Now, Texas, you can petition the Congress to secede. I’ll begin with the upsides of letting you do just that. Then I will move on to the counter argument.

Well, first, please write Uncle Sam a check for your portion of the national debt. We’d also like the roads, bridges, ports and airports we built back. Pack up the military bases and all the folks that work at and for them. You have an outstanding account regarding your citizens’ payments to Social Security, FICA and Medicare/Medicaid since the date of your declaration of secession. You need to settle up on that. Oh, and what about the bills due on support for your substandard and ill administrated systems of higher and K-12 education. Also, we want all the food back that we bought for your poor, as well as the medication for the disabled since you decided to break up our relationship.

Then there is the matter of subsidies to your oil and chemical industries. They might prefer to move their operations elsewhere in a more profitable economic climate. Mexico might look good. On the other hand, maybe Mexico would prefer to just buy the infrastructure and move their workers up your way. Yes, we know how much you’ve enjoyed that cheap labor, but now those guys will be your bosses.

Oh, you do get to keep the Alamo in this deal. Well, unless the new landlords tear it down to build condos for drug kingpins and former Latin American dictators. That will be your problem and the rest of your former nation will see about a trillion dollars returned to the Federal government. Yes, we downsized as you wished and are financially better for it.

Now, there is another way to scratch this itch that you have, this desire to reinstate the failed Republic of Texas. Let’s look to history as the issue presently on the table is not new. Indeed, it was settled by Congress, the Supreme Court, another tall, skinny guy with big ears in the Oval Office, and the most horrific war up to its point in history. Remember the Civil War? I’m a professor by training, so I’m going to give you a history lesson in terms that even folks challenged by a public system of education that teaches that Jesus rode around on dinosaurs and that the world is 6,659 years old can understand it.

So, forget about Honest Abe as the President. He’s a short order cook in this presentation. Picture old Gus at the Mope On Inn Diner. He knows how to whip up an omelet in a jiffy; a three egg omelet. He knows that you got to break the eggs to make that omelet.

The first egg is a vision that dates to the founders of this nation, The United States. Those folks back in 1776 had a concept for a nation that would be a democratic republic and span the entire continent to serve as a beacon of freedom for the entire globe. They saw the resurrection of an ideal not executed in two thousand years: free people sharing their commonwealth (think about that word) and collectively executing the will of the majority without trampling on the wishes of a minority.

The second egg is the notion that what this nation is about will never be altogether achieved but always strived for. We will always work toward that more perfect union that remains forever on the horizon as a goal. The nation had to be united and the our states indivisible lest we might as well have just thrown away that first egg.

The third egg was delivering the People’s franchise in those first two efforts. Everybody, every man and woman of whatever race, religion or no religion, wherever they came from on this planet or in this land had to have skin in the game. Else wise, those first two eggs got busted for nothing. Half a million folks would die in bloodshed beyond what any in Lincoln’s time could have yet imagined and half the nation would lay in utter ruin for no purpose. Thankfully, Lincoln was a fine short order cook.

So, Texas, here’s your omelet. Don’t worry about splashing it with pepper sauce. You can have extra onions if that pleases. Some folks like their’s with beans and tangy cheese. You can have it any way you want it, but you do have to sit with the other folks that amble into The Mope On Inn and abide by their chatter.

Thank you and good tidings to all in our United States.”

The Future is Now!

Dear Friends,

I present to you at no charge an exclusive look into the recent past, our present and near future as it may be. I am no mind reader nor savant of any kind. I cannot reliably prognosticate nor see into the future. I just read the writing writ upon the mists of Time as the river flows by.

Since the simultaneous rise of electronic computing, advances in modern prosthetics, medicine, surgery and brain science it has been a recently realizable dream to meld Human with machine. You encounter the present result each day when you notice an individual with a small neural implant on the back of his skull attached to a microphone in his ear. That part looks like a hearing aid. The implant’s interface to his brain looks like he’s pasted a quarter-sized piece of Silly Putty® to the left rear of his head, just above the hairline. He is a deaf person given the chosen gift of hearing by technology. He is a Cyborg; a Man Machine.

He is not alone. Today you are starting to see folks with funny looking glasses. They are blind but they can see by means of machine vision that communicates through digital to analog pulses to their Visual Cortex. It doesn’t work all that well yet, but it hold the promise of much better performance. Why settle for normal Human vision when you could toggle a switch to see like a butterfly or bee, see into the radio spectrum or perceive a night sky full of Gamma Ray Bursters making the best fireworks you could hope for?

Meanwhile, a lady in a wheelchair, a paraplegic, took the first sip of orange juice she’d had in thirty years without the help of an aide whom she communicated with only by blinking her eyes. She recently simply thought about having that beverage and a computer wired into her head told a disembodied robotic arm on a rolling table by her bed to give her some refreshment. It obeyed. She controlled a machine that, albeit temporarily, was part of her. She did it by wishing for a drink. That simple.

Well, it wasn’t really that simple. To get to this point of modest Human/Machine integration, a code had to be cracked. It’s the toughest code we know of this side of >Why and How Does Anything Exist?<. The code I refer to is the code of our most basic cerebral and sub-cerebral nervous functioning. It is the code clacking, gurgling and ticking behind our every physical and verbal expression, our very thoughts, both conscious and unconscious. A machine with such capacity would truly be a Mind Reader. Such machines have already been demonstrated in prototype to construct the words that a person is thinking and shine digital images of their visual imagination on fluorescing screens.

Flash forward to 2016. The United States unveils the federally mandated Mind Meters® to be installed in every airport, every ATM, every 7-11 and intersection where there is a stop light. Citizens can no longer get to the curb from the cab without having their minds scanned.

What sort of problems will pop up when brain scanners are perfected and installed on every corner. How will my nation’s economy and social fabric be ravaged as millions of folks from all walks of life leave their jobs to take online courses so that they might qualify as a Homeland Security Mind Readers and thus be able read the rampant pornographic thoughts of airline passengers and all the folks at banks or just walking down Main Street during lunch hour?

Surgeons will leave anesthetized patients in mid-appendectomy on the operating table. Lawyers and real estate speculators will leave money on the proverbial table to lunge at this new opportunity. The food service industry will become bereft of illegal immigrants working the dish washers as they flock toward the opportunity to find out what other illegal immigrants are really thinking about that skinny girl in the summer dress. “Is it what am I thinking or even dirtier?” Grandmothers will abandon their charges in bassinets to examine the secret thoughts of those swarthy fellows with their Mind Meters® as they also mine the imaginations of the very proper business man visualizing a lady’s underwear as she in turn tunes in a “suspect” for a reading of his response to another’s response to the response of another grooving to the spike heels of that “looker” as he ponders what’s on top of those long legs and her girlfriend monitors the entire situation. Teachers will ignore their classes while staring out the window to relentlessly scan the visual imaginations of folks on the town’s streets for signs of secret assignations underway while the kiddies are doodling on the margins of forty year old text books.

The economy will collapse, as will our culture, in a heaving sigh of an infinite loop consuming its own tail. No real work will get done. Children will be left unfed, ill educated and unattended. Every aspect of our civic life will be corroded. Commerce will sputter and belch and eventually swoon in a faint like a Victorian lady mortified that her bloomers were showing at the grand ball.

Oh, that has already happened. We don’t have to wait for 2016 and the perfection of Mind Meters®.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

Paul Ryan's Mind…

Dear Friends,

I am not a mental health professional, but I am a writer. Thus I know and can explain the narrative of this sick punk's story clearly. He's a hurt little puppy who has seen all of the older men in his family, including his dad, die in their mid-fifties. He resents his mother who had to adopt the role of authority in his life as he was tutored by priests on the inferiority of women.

He deeply fears growing old and thus perversely worships his own male body by torturing it to excess. In the disguise of perfecting it, he self-flagellates like the celibate monk that he is not and can never be given his obsession with sex and the unknowable power in a woman's womb that he strives unsuccessfully to control. He is hiding behind the smile of a man terrified of his mortality as he bargains with the very devil of his imagining that he seeks to defeat. He is doomed and lashing out against the unstoppable future. This dude's way in life makes the deal that Faust struck look like a good bet.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS