A friend recently wrote me:

Remember the realization back in the early 70's that the whole country was insane? Could it be true, could a whole country go insane?

Way back when, in the dim distant past, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and pterodactyls swooped through the skies - You know - the 70s - my friend and I were trying to get a sense of What’s Going On. Here we are, millions of years later, still trying to map out a strange land. The only difference now is he still lives in that strange land, and my family escaped across the border into Beautiful British Columbia. In fact August 22nd, marked our Third Anniversary in Canada.

I’ve written quite a bit about Our Canadian Life so I wont bore y’all with too many more tales of how much better it is up here compared to the good ole USA. To Sum Up: this is the month we can apply for Permanent Residency and the only way you could get us out of here is with a pry bar and blasting caps. If, for some bizarre reason, we were forced to go live once again back in the states, there’s a very good chance I would die of the dry heaves.

After reading through this morning’s news I had to get away from the computer and go take a walk. I can get through the Canadian news without too much difficulty, but sifting through news from the U.S. is becoming as difficult as trying to watch an entire program on FOXNews. There’s just too much dumbassery to absorb and I no longer have the stomach lining for it.

After I got back from storming through the neighborhood, and with a fresh cup of coffee in hand, I came up with The Answer. Not an answer … THE Answer.

Kay Crisman Petrini

If Kay, and other teachers like her, were allowed to do their jobs unhindered by bureaucracy and lousy paychecks, the rule of dumbasses would be over within a generation.

The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

I am so goddamned sick of hearing what Reasonable Men are saying I could puke. For a couple of weeks now the people who should have been tried and imprisoned for war crimes are back retelling their history-distorting lies to all the vacuous dolts who keep putting these beasts in front of television cameras. I don’t know how long it takes to train oneself to sound like a Reasonable Man. But once mastered its possible to carve out a lucrative career in the service of evil.

I truly hate these bastards. They’ve always been around derailing and diffusing anyone who wants to do the right thing.

A long time ago The United States invaded Vietnam. By the time America pulled out of that unholy war millions of Vietnamese had been murdered and countless numbers maimed. There are two big black walls in Washington D.C. with the names of over 58,000 American vets killed in the war etched upon them. All that death and misery because Reasonable Men started the war, and refused to end it, until every last dime could be minted from the blood of those consumed by it.

Yeah -- except for that time back in 2008 when he said atheists were as dangerous as Christian fundamentalists. Remember?

http://www.salon.com/2008/03/13/chris_hedges/

But what the hell  --  Everybody blows their wheels every now and again. I mean he earned a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School so we know he spent a lot of time, and allocated a lot of head space, to the study of gibberish. It was only natural some of that lunacy leaked out. But after The Big Blowout I guess he called the mental health department of Triple A and got back on the road again.

His latest essay, We're Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy,

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/were-post-constitutional-era

is another example of great Chris Hedges writing. But he consistently has a problem with using the correct tenses of verbs. He insists on using the present or future tense when he should be using the past tense.

We’re not losing … we’ve lost.

In 2012, Bonnie Herzog, leading tobacco analyst for Wells Fargo, predicted electronic cigarettes will overtake tobacco cigarettes within ten years. In 2013 she confirmed that projection and said Big Tobacco will take over most of the market.

A competitive free market was not going to determine the winners or losers in the e-cig industry. With this kind of money at stake it was going to take the participation of one of the United States federal executive departments, the FDA, to guarantee the takeover.

On April 24th the FDA’s long awaited deeming regulations regarding electronic cigarettes were released. If these regulations go into effect as written, the number of legal e-cig manufacturers will go from about a thousand … to about five. The twenty thousand legal e-cig products will be cut to … around six. It will cost an e-cig manufacturer close to ten million dollars to file an application with the FDA for each e-cig product. Only Big Tobacco, who has already entered the e-cig market, can afford to jump through those hoops. There will always be e-cigs. Just not the ones I use. Just not the ones I buy from the vendors I like.

In short, the FDA’s 241 pages of provisions give the e-cigarette industry to Big Tobacco.

On my 40th birthday my younger sister gave me a coffee mug with a picture on it of a mouse singing, “Hi Ho … Hi Ho … It’s over the hill I go.” It immediately became my favorite mug I was never going to use. I was going to keep it in pristine condition so I could give it back to her on her 40th birthday. But I almost didn’t get the chance. When I went to retrieve it after eight long years in storage I found the handle of the mug had snapped off. Now it was time to see if all those Crazy Glue commercials were telling the truth.

I repaired the mug, wrapped it up, and was able to re-gift as well as re-joke. But … if someone had taken a sledge hammer to the mug and reduced it to a fine white powder, no amount of Crazy Glue would help. There would be no doubt that it was irrevocably broken, smashed to bits, and it would take some sort of deranged magical thinking to think that it even could be fixed.

But what if I ignored the blatantly obvious and dedicated a little time every day to try and “repair” the mug? And even though my sister’s 40th birthday had come and gone, I still tried each day to force a mound of powder back into being a functioning coffee mug. You might say I was a little … um … strange … for even thinking about it, but as long as I kept my obsession a secret, and continued to function normally in my day-to-day life, no one would be the wiser. But as soon as you found out I’d spent almost 14 years at it, you’d definitely know I had blown my wheels. I do believe I’d fit the definition of suffering a psychotic break with reality.

A “psychotic break with reality” means hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, or feeling something that does not exist. Or believing something to be true that is false, fixed, and fantastic. Simply put, the person loses contact with external reality.