State of the Union

Sorry couldn’t help myself:

-Madam SPEAKER!

-Yes?

-MADAM SPEAKER, THE PRESIDENT OF THE…

-Who?

-THE PRESIDENT OF THE…

-(Man, whoever came up with the constitutional amendment that the Speaker of the House must be—DEAF?!)

-MADAM SPEAKER!

-Yeah?

-Ah, never… NEVER MIND, M’AM… The Prez is speaking as we yell!

Blog Suspended: Author Shot By Parrot!

Just wanted your attention… But there is a parrot in England who can say only one word, calling everybody a WANKER. Shooting with the mouth, that is. And in my case, right on the money.

I have posted enough ideas, commentary, analyses, jokes, revelations, political swipes on both sides of the Atlantic to cover a year and to shed some light on the material contained in my literary website. But the time of real creation has returned and I must use all my energy finishing a stage play in both English and French that I started writing at Christmas. You can follow its progress at http://www.anthonysteyning.com although I won’t reveal the complete work unless contacted by a serious director wanting to have a crack at it. I have several working titles but Would…that Manhattan or else Charlie’s Not Home Much Anymore the ones, for now, carrying the day.

Like General MacArthur said, I shall Return… but I have no idea when!

Thanks for your interest thus far.

Anthony Steyning

Bubblenomics

When people can no longer afford where they live, when people start taking the bus, when adults start moving back in with their parents, or share apartments with others they hardly know, when people start renting out rooms in order to pay their electricity bill, and banks don’t know what to do with repossessed homes, when this takes place on a wide scale and for many years to come, when the State can’t collect enough to cover its bills and has to cut vital services not replacing retiring workers… it is that a nation is getting poorer, losing its wealth, or at least the one it thought it had, but that probably never quite existed.

So what we’re seeing everywhere really, is countries and people getting poorer, getting stuck once more with and in a huge underclass, all that whipped up phantom wealth melting snow under a forbidding sun.

Of course, it’s nice to do well for a while, except most forget this is the exception, not the rule, living high off the hog too long. Some taking it philosophically, others not so well, after the bubble bursts. The question is do we want to live like this, on the run, under exciting but explosive bubblenomics or take an honest step back, living more evenly, not stepping around the returning homeless, on our sidewalks, having whatever there really is, distributed equitably?

This is how I expressed from another angle, under Poems in my website:

Eighth Floor Second

No matter what you read

No matter what they say

and sounds like war

World crisis

is never Armageddon

but

a set of reversals

in the Babylonian building of Finance

whereby

occasionally

Basement becomes Penthouse,

Third floor First,

Eighth floor Second

with the sad stupidity

of rapacious

architecture

evident

Once

more

Bait

Sharks are beautiful but primal and stupid. Dolphins affectionate, evolved and smart. Mammals returned to water with social intelligence. Sharks should watch & listen, have a salt drink with them

The Un-System

The Government in Spain has announced that any bank transfer of $5000.00 (equiv.) or over, will be subject of explanation to the local IRS, via the banks.

Well that will stimulate the economy, currently situated at around 20% unemployment. The chase on of course, for taxes to pay the national overdraft. But placing anyone who’s still working or creating jobs on some sort of most wanted list the craziest of all economic policies to pull a country out of its crisis. Forcing everyone and everything underground, bartering, not trading, no longer paying any taxes, or simply splitting up payments or transfers into fragments not surpassing the limit which used to be $15000.00, or so, let alone collect an increased general sales tax on goods and servcies of 18%.

This Government and its Prime Minister truly clueless about how to kickstart the economy and sadly representing a political class wallowing in its own mediocrity, never having had a job other than working for the Party, without any savy whatsoever as to how to deal with complex national problems. And answering only to that Party, never their constituents. Making the US or UK systems while much criticized, still the lesser of several evils.

At nomination time here the norm not being What Can He Do? but, To Hell With All This, He Sounds So Damn Good!

Cosmetics all of it, fake vision and methods, appearance what counts.

Not even style mattering, looking at their plastic frowns and vacant, goofy smiles.

Afterthought

The very cruellest among us are no heroes, but the most frightened. But that’s not all, cowardice is the root of all greed.

Picking on Small Fry

It never fails, courageous State or Religious bullies and mobsters picking on lone aid workers, lone hikers, technicians , reporters and if they could… on lost orphans. Holding innocents as hostage or for ransom, torturing them for fun, beheading them to vent their imagionary frustrations the way you and I slice into an apple. Ever wondering what it must be like to cut someone’s throat, the high it seems to give moral morons? Half an hour later, wait, I got sand in my shoe, can you pass me the salt, what’s for desert? Governments blackmailed, sometimes acceding, sometimes not, but the result basically negative and certainly no license to any meaningful advantage. Even 9/11, with heartfelt respect to the betrayed, in cold political terms completely meaningless, a pin prick, and an absurdity to think one ‘destroys’ America and its wealth in this fashion, or the West, or Britain, or France, similarly. If anything confirming the pathetic stupidity, narrow mindedness and cruelty of the irrationally irritable because infinitely inferior ‘heroes’. With their stolen means, inventing nothing, producing nothing, discovering nothing, nurturing nothing, dead-end nihilists.

Cervantes alreading writing that if there’s no eternity, one more reason to live as if there were. Meaning, life and today are just as sacred as anything which might follow. The same thing like saying, that if all those who believe pretended there was no afterlife, ironically their reward would be even higher, their current existence so much more dignified.

But hey, who’s listening?

Names

My hairless surgeon, Dr. Archibald Schorn, has an astonishing way of living up to his name.

Gesundheit

Vodka: Eau de Pologne?

Fiscality

I loved this cartoon, published in a British newspaper I once picked up at an airport. It depicts a cocktail party with everbody looking at man with his foot attached to his forehead, an arm coming out of his back, his nose on his shoulders, his ear sewed to his knee, legs twisted like a vine, and so forth. Its caption was: Oh, that’s Jones! He writes our tax laws!