Foto by tgw, New York City (retrospect #2), 2008
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I Am Becoming an Elitist
And why not become an elitist? The word has a very bad reputation, though one of its definitions is "egalitarian," a belief that all people come into this world with equal opportunities--and this can even in a sort of way include humans born with defects: either the idiot, the paraplegic, or the superdeducer (in terms of easy deduction)--i.e.: idiot savants (like this little girl idiot savant singer that is being currently foisted on the public--same with that plump rather dull English babe, that Boyle woman (her star is fading, if it hasn't already crashed)); Stephen Jay Hawking; or Sherlock Holmes (and, yes, why not include fictional characters as real-world models?).
According to Jose Ortega y Gasset, the spoiled-brat child, the child of aristocracy, for instance, the heir, can never be a real person. Why? Because they never have really EARNED their wealth (like worked for it), instead they have inherited it from the ones (like their grandfathers) who EARNED it (or stole it; stealing is earning (crooks work for their booties)), thereby never having anything of their own to use in identifying who THEY really are. The American right-thinking Sociologist/Economist, Thorstein Veblen, would surely agree with Ortega y Gasset on this matter.
The negative aspects in the definition of elitist are based on cultural put down of oversmart (in terms of correct thinking) humans. Like the American Fundie Christian attitude toward education--"You can go to college, you can go to school, but without Jesus, you're an educated fool." That designates anyone with an education who doesn't believe in Jesus Christ as "Lord and Master" a fool. The American Elitist writer, Harper's magazine's Russell Lynes, used Highbrow and Lowbrow as his way of measuring the ordinary and the extraordinary in terms of the furrows in one's brow relating to the position of one's status within the nation's culture. One thing Lynes said I like is: "In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste." Lynes put down in snobbish terms according to his critics the spoiled child! Same as Ortega y Gasset. Same as Thorstein Veblen. Same as C. Wright Mills. Commentary (think Norman Podwhoreitz and rightwing Judaism (Zionism)) magazine noted: "WE ADORE self-appointed scolds who tell us what shallow characters we are. Here is Mr. Lynes casting us as History's Spoiled Children. We have it too good, he says."
I have over and over written on this crusty blog how we are ruled by the spoiled brats of the original stolen-wealth families of the USA: the Morgans, the Harrimans, the Rockefellers, the Chases, the Salomons, the Goldmans, the Sachs, the Monsantos, the Lehmans, the Hiltons, the Koch Brothers, the Carnegies, the Melons, the Guggenheims, the Whitneys, the Pratts, the Tafts, the Kennedys, the Shrivers, the Tischmans, the Trumps, the Bushes, the Schwabs, etc. Any name you see on a US foundation: spoiled brats. Any name you see on a medical pavillion: spoiled brats. Any name you see on a cultural center: spoiled brats. Mitt Romney is a spoiled brat. John Kerry is a spoiled brat. Bill Clinton is certainly a spoiled brat. Barack Obama? Well, check out his past. Is he a spoiled brat or isn't he? I say he is.
Here's what Ortega y Gasset says about these spoiled-brats of human history: In The Revolt of the Masses in a chapter titled, "The Self-Satisfied Age," we find a paragraph: "This type (the self-satisfied type) which at present is to be found everywhere and everywhere imposes his own spiritual barbarism, is, in fact, the spoiled brat of human history. The spoiled child is the heir who behaves exclusively as a mere heir. In this case the inheritance is civilization--with its conveniences, its security, in a word, with all its advantages.... The aristocrat inherits, that is to say, he finds attributed to his person, conditions of life which he has not created, and which, therefore, are not produced in organic union with his personal, individual existence. At birth he finds himself installed, suddenly and without knowing how, in the midst of his riches and his prerogatives. In his own self, he has nothing to do with them, because they do not come from him. They are the giant armour of some other person, some other human being, his ancestor. And he has to live as a heir, that is to say, he has to wear the trappings of another existence" [p. 71, The Revolt of the Masses, Signet Mentor Books ed., 1950].
I grew up with privileged heirs. Some of my best friends in high school were the children of oil men. I had friends in high school who drove Corvettes and Thunderbirds; or who rode expensive Harleys; I had high school friends who had tennis courts in their backyards; I played on the high school golf team with boys whose fathers were oil men or doctors and who had full bags of brand-new clubs, who drove to the golf course in their own cars. One of my friends in high school while still in high school when his father died inherited his own cattle spread, the largest cattle ranch in my hometown's area. One of my high school friends whose daddy was an oil man had lived all over the Middle East, in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi-Arabia. Later, when his father died, he inherited beaucoup shares of all the major oil companies--his largest chunk of stocks being in Aramco (the Arab-American Oil Company). These kids seemed perfectly normal to me. I was never jealous of them. In the world of oil, one never knows when geologists from Standard Oil or SOHIO or Socony-Mobil or Sinclair or Cosden are going to find an oil deposit under your going-under ranch or worthless piece of land on which nothing will grow...or on those 40 acres your Uncle Cypert left you in his will...and then Halliburton or Schlumberger are going to come sink a well on your property and the next thing you know you are a member of the nouveau riche. To this day I still depend on a lucky strike for most of my successes in terms of money.
The most money I've ever had in my life was when my parents were killed together in a car wreck and my God how the money rolled in off the various insurance policies and land sales and the selling of their house, my home during those high school years, and the big pool of money in a savings account my mother had started back during World War II and which was bulging at the seams by the time my brother and I inherited it. Inheritance. I lived 7 carefree years on that inheritance--with a wife, too--7 years of living in a Vieux Carre apartment in New Orleans, a hotel's penthouse suite in Mexico City, a mountainside villa in Santa Fe, an upper-floor luxury apartment in San Francisco, and finally to end up living in a two-bedroom apartment on West 56th and Sutton Place in New York City, where soon that inheritance ran out--I remember selling off the last of my once win/win stock portfolio, 200 shares of Sperry-Rand I sold for $30-something-bucks-a-share. My wife by then had to get a job, which she did as a 20-year-old executive secretary and legal aid to a Lebanese New Yorker millionaire oil man whose biggest partner was at that time the world's richest man, Adnan Koshogi, who had intimate connections to the Saudi-Arabian royal family through his daddy who had been the Saudi king's personal physician. Soon my wife networking at a jet-like pace, after the Lebanese millionaire (she quit him while we were cruising with him on the QEII, which he had chartered to personally take all of his crew and political cronies to the opening of his new jet fuel refinery in Newfoundland) she shot her way up quickly in the New York City business world to eventually end up being elected to the Board of one of New York City's largest executive recruiting firms (when she quit this firm her severance pay was $200,000 (this was the early 1970s)). By then my inheritance had run out and I was void of personal income, living like a duke on my wife's income, a gracious situation for me though it soon led to our divorcing. And that was bad news for spoiled brat me--and, yes, I've always admitted I was a spoiled child--an accusation constantly hurled at me by my very much older brother who was born during the Great Depression and was always chiding me for having had it so good as a kid--"I had a full-time job by the time I was 14," he was always bragging to me--and my brother was right. I was a spoiled child. And I can vouch that it isn't easy for a spoiled child to succeed above and beyond his inheritance. Later, my brother got lucky and became a millionaire (from an inheritance--the owner of a large Dallas newspaper left her controlling shares of stock to my brother in honor of his award-winning editorials he wrote about Dallas after the Kennedy assassination). After my brother's death, I inherited another little nest egg, which I immediately scrambled--adding some bacon and onions and tomatoes to it--and gobbled it up before finally being forced to get a job of my own, which I finally did in 1981 when I took a job in the Printing & Design department of a Big 8 accounting firm.
While working at Time-Life as a copyeditor, I appealed to a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for a junior writing position with SI. I told him I wanted to be a writer, to which he replied, "You want to make money in this field, get into the advertising end of it--become an adwriter; that's where the big bucks are." And that's what I did--at age 40, after living like a spoiled brat and a junior playboy for 40 years, I became a professional writer/editor. I worked my way up the ladder from Time-Life to CBS Production to Viacom International (the spin off of the CBS production department ordered by the Justice Department in the 1970s) to Chapman Direct Marketing to the Big 8 accounting firm and from there into medical editing and my best paying job ever on a Big Pharma advertising agency on Madison Avenue in the old Look Building (Look magazine), my desk overlooking the roof and steeples of St. Patrick's Cathedral, a job at which two years in a row I made over 100,000 bucks. No brag, just facts. I made so much money--it worked on me the same as inheriting wealth--so soon I left that racket and decided to base my next success on my own writing and music talents.
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You know this threat of a Greater Depression than the Great Depression if We the People do not pay the interest on our loans from The People's Capitalist Republic of China by August--when the new budget and deficit-spending caps are supposed to be passed by Congress.
This austerity bullshit is such absolutely genuine bullshit. The Greek people are NOW facing the same problem as we're going to be facing in August--they were going to not be able to pay off the interest on their debts--those caused by the Greek parliament getting involved with Goldman-Sachs and their surefire/win/win toxic derivatives scams--so Greece appealed to the IMF and the Euro Bank for a bailout, which these crooked institutions then nailed up on the barn door the "austerity" measures they expected the Greek people to accept, or else fuck bailing them out. With these austerity measures, the IMF goons warned the Greeks that if they failed to accept them, the whole European economy might collapse! Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Iceland told the IMF and the Euro Bank to stick austerity up their wahzoos and reneged on their debt payments and nothing has happened to them; in fact, Iceland on their own are solving their problems--FUCK the Euro Bank and the USA-controlled IMF. I mean, the USA is totally behind these IMF austerity measures they are imposing on these failing countries like Ireland, Spain, Portugal (Portugal has already caved in to these pirates), and if truth were known England. The headquarters for the IMF are here in New York City. The US so far has chosen Euro Trash financial crooks to act as head of the IMF; this time for the first time they have chosen a woman as its head, a woman who is currently the Financial Minister of France. In her first speech as head of the IMF she immediately started warning Greece that if it didn't sell its soul to the IMF and the Euro Bank, dire straits were ahead for not just Greece but the whole European Union. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Fact is, the IMF is broke. It gets its money from the US Treasury. [By the way, that big fat slob ex-head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, will soon get out of jail free to return to his sweet charming life of living in $3,000-a-night hotel rooms with expectations of being able to rape the maid at such prices. Already the Power Elitists are trumping up all kind of charges against the Black woman from Guinea (it once was French Guinea) who charged this big fat French sugar daddy with rape. First off they are spreading the rumor that her charges were unreliable since she was a liar and had claimed she'd been raped once before--you see, US White men can't believe a woman, whether Black or White, if she claims she's been raped more than once in a lifetime. This is especially true of Black hotel maids. Now, the Power Elite White boys have come up with not only saying she's a lying Black bitch but now they are rumoring that this single mother is involved in criminal activities like DRUG DEALING! So soon this fat cat Power Elitist banker will be cleared of all charges and the Black maid will be hauled off to Rikers Island facing 25 to Life. Next time, bitch, lay back and enjoy it, as one old New York City weatherman advised women at the end of his last NYC televised weather report--"If you all are getting raped, ladies, rather than fightin', just lay back and enjoy it." His name was Tex, and, yes, he was a Texan, and that advice cost Tex his half-a-million-a-year salary and he disappeared from the NYC teevee scene never to be seen again.][NOTE: Dominique Strauss-Kahn WAS SET TOTALLY FREE FRIDAY, JULY 1. Yes, the rape-hollering Black woman (foreigner!! oh, but then Strauss-Kahn is a foreigner, too) is a liar (I knew it all along), the prosecution blurted out during old Dom's New York State hearing. Not only is she a liar, but this Black bitch is also a drug dealer and connected to criminal elements through money laundering as well (as if old Dom isn't connected to anything crooked). This is the same prosecution that threw old Sleazebag Strauss-Kahn in the multimillion-dollar-SOHO-apartment slammer in the first place. I mean are we to believe the prosecution never checked the reliability of the victim before they slammed down so hard on that old evil banker. So there ya go, folks. You got the money, you've got the freedom. To the rich go the spoils--and now, a Black hotel maid is facing prison time while Big Daddy Dominique will go totally free and soon be back to assaulting maids in $3,000-a-night hotel rooms. You see, our legal system really works! Also note the name Cyrus Vance, Jr., one of the NY State prosecuting attorneys--here's a typical spoiled-brat little well-connected rich boy, son of old Cyrus Vance, Sr., both political parasites living off the government dole.]
Reagan started wrecking our economy when that dumbass Alzheimer's poster boy Grade B-minus actor allowed David Stockton and his wide-eyed Neo-Con faith in the absurd economics of Milton Friedman to take over as his economics guru--a guru of trickle-down economics, that which G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush called voodoo economics. Reagan started it off by running up the largest budget deficit ever in the history of this country at the time. Then G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush came up with his 1,000 Points of Light bullshit and his New World Order, at the same time shoving our asses deeper into the bottomless well of debt by breaking Reagan's budget deficit records wildly (later, Pappy's worthless spoiled brat son, G.W., would shatter all existing budget deficits--that wrecked economy this little spoiled-brat rich boy passed on to Barack Obama, probably saying like Jerry Lee Lewis said as he finished his set just before Chuck Berry was due to come on stage by setting the piano on fire, saying, "Let's see the Nigger top that!." Chuck topped it by blowing old Jerry Lee's Old Lawsbanana ass out the back window). Then Billy Jeff "Big Dog" Clinton comes along with Democratic Neo-Con Neo-Liberal bullshit, takes all the regulations off the banking and financial and insurance companies, and using the economy as a stepping stone to two terms as president, he left office claiming a budget surplus (I've seen arguments that Clinton's surplus was rigged to be a surplus when it really wasn't). The office he left was the Oval office, that office in which Old Big Dog had his little "Hey, this is fun!" pornographic incidents with Monica Lewd-winsky. Can you picture President Obama diddling a young woman government employee with an illegal Cuban cigar in the Oval Office? "I did not have sex with that woman." Dammit, I agree, diddling a girl with a Cuban cigar isn't having sex with her. The cigar is having sex with her, so let's bomb Cuba. Getting a blowjob from a girl is not having sex with her either. This is the same president who had to pay $850,000 to shut up Paula Jones, a woman who Big Dog had called up to his hotel room when he was Governor of the hick and very backward state of Arkansas to show her his Big Willie Pop fully erected--that speckled pecker he was so proud of. And Paula Jones was a woman of the semi-ugly kind the Big Dog seemed to like. I mean writing about this makes it so hard to believe--I mean it is so absurd.
These are the ethically bankrupt MEN We the People keep electing and reelecting to lead us and manage us and rule over us, which is all Congress is, a law-making body of spoiled brats and 2nd-story lawyers and parasitic millionaires who make their livings and nest eggs off We the People.
Our Congress is a Ship of Fools. I just saw that total Mormon idiot Oren Hatch braying like the mule he is about how Obama is sliding this country off into the ditch of Socialism, that place that positions this nation just above the snapping jaws of political/economic Hell. OOOOOH, I am shuddering with the insane fear that Obama is a Socialist! Get out of here! He's a god-damn corporate lawyer for God's sake. A National Socialist, yeah, if that's what you mean by Socialist!
And then a couple'a days ago, up pops that Connecticut idiot with shit for brains, Joe LIEberman--he's back with his solution to all our problems. Why can't We the People ever get rid of little prick politicians like Oren Hatch (he's been in Congress since I was a kid) and Joe LIEberman and this new female piece of crap who's replacing Sarah "Pale Face" Palin as the Repugnican HOT BABE candidate, Michelle Bachmann. Especially since Sister Sarah's bus tour flopped and backfired on her; in fact, it cost Sarah her role as the Repugnican HOT BABE. I mean the Koch Brothers are now jacking off over images of Michelle Bachmann.
I actually heard Michelle called "extremely smart" on commercial pap teevee last Sunday. All day long she was the center of attention on all those wild-full-of-crap Sunday newsmaker interview shows. I check out where she went to college. Guess where? If you guessed ORAL ROBERTS UNIVERSITY, you are correct madam or sir. An Oral Roberts graduate is "extremely smart"? Here's how smart this dumb Wonder Woman is: she has made the statement that if she were president she would rule the nation using the Holy Babble of Protestant Christianity as her source book. For, you see, old Pentecostal-Iowan-White-Trash Michelle truly believes the Holy Babble (Bible) of Protestant Christianity holds the answers to all our problems, all of them: political; economic; social; moral; etc. That is it holds the answers to all our problems unless you happen to be a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim, a JEW! Now why in several layers of Holy Hell would any American in his or her right mind...and I stop myself right there--perhaps there is no American in his or her right mind right now! I itchily (in the sense I've got ants in my pants) see a great possibility that our first woman president will be a Christian-Oral-Roberts-U-trained Jesus-Lover-of-Her-Soul rubber-room candidate. And why not?, I shout across the rooftops. And I stand up proudly on those rooftops and stentoriously declare, "I, thegrowlingwolf , do hereby swear myself to backing hail-heartedly the candidacy of our first woman president, Michelle Backwardsmann! The new and improved Sarah Palin.
Ugh. It gives me the willies to write about these creeps even if it is in a sarcastic manner.
The compromising has not worked, you dumbass Dumbocrats! President Obama, the White Racists Repubnicans are gonna haul out the racial slurs and jungle-bunny insinuations as they shiver in fear at the oncoming onslaught of Brown people taking this country over--BROWN people who for the most part are Catholics! OH HOLY NIGHT IN HELL...CATHOLICS! The POPE finally in the White Man's House.
According to Michelle Bach(Backwards)mann, during her inauguration she will personally ask us all to get on our knees and accept Jesus H. Christ as our personal savior--then she'll have an altar call, "Come all ye who labor...Come all ye who wish ye were having sex with me...Come, come, come...let's bring Jesus H. Christ into our Constitution as our nation's government's savior, Lord and Master, yassuh, yassuh, Boss Mister Jesus, make slaves of all the poor, the broken and maimed, those who were so stupid they allowed their houses to go into foreclosure...OH YE OF LITTLE FAITH!" Oh, I can see it now, PRAYER back into our privatized schools. I can see a huge block of granite with the Ten Commandments on it placed in front of every government building. "Thou shalt not kill...unless you are Commander in Chief of the whole friggin' USA Jesus-Christ military complex"--Praise the Lardy Lard and pass me one of those groat clusters--steamy hot, dripping with soul sauce and real cow butter...ah the illusions of grandeur I suffer through.
theillusionalspoiledbratgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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Speaking of OUR Spoiled Brats, Here's Michael Parenti on the Subject:
"The free marketeers have a deep all-abiding faith in laissez-faire for it is a faith that serves them well. It means no government oversight, no being held accountable for the environmental disasters they perpetrate. Like greedy spoiled brats, they repeatedly get bailed out by the government (some free market!) so that they can continue to take irresponsible risks, plunder the land, poison the seas, sicken whole communities, lay waste to entire regions, and pocket obscene profits"
[From: www.michaelparenti.org/DisposablePlanet.html].
Nikola Tesla's Death Ray Machine
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a noted inventor, scientist and electrical engineer. He invented Tesla coils, transformers, alternating current electrical generators and was the first early pioneer of radio technology. Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon from the early 1900s until his death. In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media concerning charged particle beams.[17]
Tesla was noted for claiming that he had developed what he called a "teleforce" weapon, or death ray. This death ray could "send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles (400 km) from a defending nation's border and will cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks", as said in an article. He offered this invention to the U.S. War Department and to several European countries without success. Various conspiracy theories persist regarding the nature of this device and the whereabouts of Tesla's model or schematics[18] for it [from Wikipedia].
www.drjudywood.com/