What to do?

Greetings gentle reader!

I haven't posted here in quite some time because the recommendation that authors blog (to build readership) is more germaine to the self-help and how-to genres. (The stated purpose of author blogs is to establish yourself as an expert, so you become the go-to source for your chosen specialty/topic.

When it comes to fiction we have a different term for it. We call it 'giving away the store!'

It's been a year now since I took to facebook to promote my works and the result is more or less 'as expected'. If you don't have a marketing budget people aren't going to know your book exists.

In defense of my works, both have stood up well (meaning their subject matter hasn't become obsolete or their central premises debunked...yet)

Of course, the storylines are compelling and readers still say the story 'sucks them in' (making it difficult to put the book down...which has both it's pluses and it's downside!) At least the short stories can be completed in a short sprint instead of the marathon one of my novels can be.

But, and again we arrive at the 'problem' blogging poses for fiction writers, you aren't here to listen to me pump myself up...but if you are here for the sheer lack of anything better to do then I know of three good books that will occupy your imagination for hours if not days, should you be pressed for free time!

And if my fans are any indication, leaving you hungry for more...

Thanks for visiting,

Enjoy your day!

A Time to Worry

The past sixty years has proven to be that 'long strange trip' immortalized by the band The Grateful Dead.

Allegory is one thing but our reality has indeed taken a turn for the dire and our corporate owned media is strangely mute on the subject.

Is there 'nothing to worry/be concerned about?' I certainly hope so because I don't trust the mawkish ghoul that passes for the fifth estate these days as far as I can throw it (even if I weren't old and feeble!)

Again, which narrative you subscribe to dictates how high the threat level has become. On the surface, using the 'official' paradigm the corporate media expounds, the 'unthinkable' is still pretty much precisely that. The former USSR commiting air support and ground troops into the (largely expendable) Middle East in apparent direct opposition to US/UN efforts to rein in ISIS is being interpreted as 'saber-rattling' by the two former nuclear superpowers.

Geez, am I off the reservation again? (You can bet your boots I am!)

Let us look at this from the Gegner perspective/narrative, one that posits global political tension is totally 'artificial'...a fabrication and most often a cloak for committing attrocities against enemies of the 'status quo'.

Which is to opine that those who hold power in what passes for our society are in league with one another. This is why two governments with a notoriously loose grip on their nuclear arsenals should not be lining up for an 'oops'.

Or would it be safer to say it would be the farthest thing from an 'accident' since the near spontaneous collapse of global monarchy.

Even the history books don't offer an explanation of that unseemly turn of events.

But the 'peace dividend' (necessary to develop an industrial society) had the unforseen side effect of producing an out of control population.

In the Seventies, scientists pointed to the 'population explosion'...a term that has fallen out of the public lexicon even though the problem itself hasn't diminished. (We were told by the corporate owned propagandists that 'technology' would solve the population problem. and that was the end if the subject.)

But that hasn't happened because they haven't cracked the energy nut.

Our entire modern social model collapses without cheap abundant energy. Dunno how many of you realize what the end of 'cheap energy' would look like but you're really not going to like it when 'they' pull the plug.

Okay, now I've done it! I've invoked the mysterious/omnipresent 'they'!

Who, precisely, are 'they?' [and like all good whack jobs I goggle in incomprehension and ask' aren't you paying attention?']

They are the less than one percent who have claimed ownership/dominion over this planet and everything on it.

Sort of disturbing to be called a lunatic when this entire situation indeed indicates major psychological problems, (starting with being a first-degree sociopath!)

But they have forced a fanatical belief in money down your throat so you're already primed to swallow just about anything they dream up.

But I (of necessity) digress.

Supposing I'm correct and there really are people who claim (divinely no less) that this planet and everything on it is THEIRS. How far would they go towards preserving what remains for them and theirs?

Would they nuke the lion's share of us out of existence? [In a heartbeat, considering the alternative.]

The clock is ticking and I'm sure I'm not the only that notices things are getting more than a little 'out of hand'.

The alternatives are few, there is a way out but that path is narrow and the window of opportunity is closing.

What should worry you to your core is why nothing is being done to entrench renewable energy, nothing.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Mental Enema

I post sporadically because most of the time the silence is deafening…and it’s sort of counterproductive to have these conversations with yourself.

So, under the delusion that somebody is paying attention, I will cut to the chase and explain what motivated me to park it in front of the keyboard to give myself yet another thorough mental enema.

Bernie (not the billionaire) keeps reaching out for a campaign contribution and I can’t bring myself to do it because it would amount to pissing into the wind.

Let’s suppose Bernie succeeds in ‘winning’ the White House…what is the ‘veto pen’ going to do against mix bag of certifiable whack-jobs?

Naturally, little things lit this spark in my mind…starting with a conservative ‘ranting’ about how Team USA isn’t # 1 anymore.

By now I’m sure you’ve seen the internet video where this guy ‘pretends’ to be the adult and ‘correct’ a poor High Schooler regarding her ‘mis-conception’ that America is the ‘greatest country in the world’

To be fair, she asked a panel of self-appointed ‘experts’ why they thought brand USA was # 1 and knothead, the sole dissenter’s response was beyond disturbing, bordering on delusional.

This video originally made the rounds pointing a finger at the Boomers as the ‘Worst Generation’…when the truth is our grandparents (the alleged ‘greatest generation’) squandered the opportunity to make an example of people who put their self-interests ahead of those of our species.

I want you to stop for a minute and consider, if you will, ‘reality’.

Bean-blower starts his infantile tirade with kicking ‘liberals’, calling them losers…which is entirely correct. The problem is he doesn’t even touch on WHY Liberals lose.

Simple, because those who control ‘money’ make the rules.

And don’t interpret that literally because Gold has NOTHING to do with money.

It is a fiction the thieves feed.

This brings us full circle with the little known fact that 90% of crime is ‘cash & carry’ yet our moronic ‘leaders’ won’t ban cash!

Again I ask you to step back a little and look at ‘how’ the situation got this way.

Liberals we literally purged from politics by the political ‘sniff-test’. If you weren’t a rabid capitalist you were on your own finance wise.

Once Reagan broke the unions (the PATCO incident should have shut the nation down but no, the poisoning of the working classes mind was already well advanced. The Unions protected screw-ups while too many good people took a sharp stick in the eye and the [bought & paid for] union reps just shrugged, destroying their brand for personal greed.)

Especially with Japan being held up as a shining example of how corporate/worker relations ‘should be.’Of course, this was at the beginning of the ‘Global Race to the Bottom’ and Japan was just a gateway to China.

Now that the race has reached its conclusion, the world’s customer base has been pauperized and it’s workforce minimized, is it any wonder we have a surfeit of billionaires?

So on one ‘side’ of the political equation we have the rabid capitalists, willing to sell out jobs and safety for more tax cuts that will only make the world poorer.

The other side is worse…characterized as ‘tax and spend’ do-gooders…again, more interested in protecting screw-ups than regular people…

Where does this unlikely combination of bad and worse leave us?

With a totally dis-functional government.

I need not remind you that we do not have the tools to fix this, they simply don’t exist.

Are we done? Not by a long shot! Another distressing piece of fecal matter lodged in my mind is the latest liberal hobby horse of our nation leading the world in the number of people incarcerated.

Last night HBO ran a special on this topic and I couldn’t watch it.
WHY do YOU think we have so many people locked up?

Could it be because the whack-job capitalists knew there’d be trouble if they exported worker’s jobs and they needed a proactive solution?

What do you do with the ‘surplus population?’

Apparently our ‘betters’ believe prison is a reasonable answer.

And again I point to rabid self-interest being passed off as being in the public’s interest. (If you aren’t being mugged by all those workers the ‘more for me’ capitalist can’t use then, left handedly, they’re correct.)

There is a better way. It is insane in a world with so many willing hands sitting idle that we live in perpetual poverty directly because of ‘more for me’ capitalism!

Those of us on the ‘bottom end’ of capitalism know it doesn’t work and despite the isolated, delusional (and therefore none too bright) conservo-whacko we need to implement a more equitable social sharing mechanism…that capitalists have no hand in designing or implementing.

Have you seen the humorous commercial promoting a new online trading site called ‘Jet’?

Well, let me tell you here and now why we no longer ‘barter’

Because humans are ‘opportunists’ and we’d all be chasing the latest ‘trend’ (attempting to maximize return on effort/outlay) instead of focusing on doing what needed doing. The shortages would be staggering.

Just as unemployment (real unemployment as measured by the labor force participation rate) is worse than it was during the, er, ‘first’ global depression, commonly characterized as the ‘Great Depression’…an event never to be repeated but the more for me Capitalists couldn’t step aside…and they won’t.

So…if things hang together until next November (and there’s a damn good chance they won’t.) are you going to go to the polls with or without your torch and good length of sturdy rope?

Between now and then, prepare!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Had to Happen

Well, I finally got 'Happy Birthday'd'. My 59th was Sunday and on Wednesday I got another visit from my old friend 'Lack of Work'.

My resume is largely phantom at this point in the game, even the McDonalds I worked at when I was a kid is a smokin' hole in the ground today.

If I held my (complete) resume to my chin, it would hit the floor (and I'm six feet tall)

Not a big surprise if you've been paying attentiion to our massively mis-managed economy (capitalism sucks, it only benefits the 'capitalist'!)

If my track record is anything to go by I (along with a few hundred million other, er, 'unsuccessful' individuals who haven't done a very good job of 'making themselves useful' in this bootstrap environment created for us by the capitalists.

Why me? Sort of figured I was in trouble when I figured out I was but one of a small handful of non-relatives. Almost everybody else in the company was related to the big guy (and good on him for taking care of his own! I don't blame him in the slightest! In fact, I don't blame anybody but the freebooting bucaneers that saddled us with this 'buyer beware' operating system (where even the judges have to look to their pocketbook before rendering...judgement.)

Decide the 'wrong way' and you won't be a judge much longer, fairness and impartiality be damned.

This is even more reprehensible when you consider how money is BS, a 'legal fiction' that you are forced to agree to.

I know I'm not the only one that did a doubletake when I read how today's 'experts' are recommending that you have a couple of million set aside so you don't run out of cash after you retire.

How the hell is anybody earning an 'average' wage supposed to lay aside that much cash when the average wage only affords a 'hand to mouth' existence?

Obviously the 'experts' aren't referring to the 'average individual' when they are dispensing retirement advice. They are addressing their 'betters'.

There's a lot wrong in the world and none of it will change until they run what we currently suffer off a cliff. Then the Bucaneers will start all over again, telling what you do and don't deserve (while they expect YOU to do all the heavy lifting'...and the sad truth is you'll do it (happily, waving the flag and saluting the whole time) so long as it allows you to live indoors and eat regularly!

Look at how cheaply we sell justice (and with it what passes for 'freedom'.)

Not everyone is a moron...but the sad truth is too many are. It's not their fault, it's how they were built. Only a few had to be smart enough to figure out how to do the job safely, the rest just had to put their backs into it and do what they were told.

Yes, good citizen, there is shockingly little interest in justice or fairness, it's almost like the qualities have been bred out of our species (as much as they could be, we'd have gone extinct if they had succeeded in elimanating those qualities that make us human entirely.

Is the pendulum swinging back toward justice and equality?

If it is, the exploiters are working overtime to thwart those influences that challenge their power over the rest of us.

The majority of us are child-like, trusting and gullible (to a fault, just look at the state of our political system and shudder at how it got that way!)

If we don't put a stop to those who would cheat you of your basic rights for their own enrichment, we have nobody but ourselves to blame.

So get off your dead backsides and do it!

Thanks for leting me inside your head,

Gegner.

Interesting

Hello there, good citizen! This blog exists to promote my works but the experts say 'selling your work' (on it's own merit) is the WRONG way to go about it. They suggest that you promote your work on the basis of its 'benefit' to you, the reader.

Um, great advice for 'self-help/how-to' books but how do you accomplish that when you write 'speculative fiction'? I write about things as they might be (often in a technology gone wrong vein.) So what does this do for the reader except to broaden their horizons?

I'll take it one step further because my 'customer base', the number of people capable of thinking 'outside the box' is small and getting smaller with the media's LCD and dumbing down projects long underway.

At a time when 90 percent of the population got their news from printed sources it was estimated that the average IQ was 100. This also occurred at a time when people discussed the issues of the day among one anohter, reaching a kind of 'consensus'. Now that the majority of population gets its information via visual (and not necessarily 'factual') media, that IQ has dropped considerably. Worse, discussion of the issues of the day has virtually disappeared, we have a consensus about nothing.

We complain our kids are poorly socialized when we adults are just as guilty. Either we nod along as the village blow-hard raves incoherently about the latest talking point the media spouts intended to outrage just such personality types (in the old days nobody would pay attention to such whackos because everybody knew they just liked to hear themselves talk...and that they didn't even make sense to themselves by the time their rant was through.)

Which is to opine that people today do a lot less thinking for themselves, something the media knows and takes maximum advantage of.

It is especially obvious in the presidential election cycle is in season, the whoppers get bigger and bigger and the non-issues are draged front and center while the tone deaf media wails in misery about the 'shrinking' middle class while totally ignoring the working class.

Worse, the punditry fails to point this out, making them just as ignorant as the poor fools who 'think' they are part of the much abused 'middle'.

You can fool yourself all you want but if you aren't a degreed professional using that degree to make your living then you're not 'middle class'. Chances are you're working class and, if you're like most of us, you're also part of the largest segment of the working class, the 'working poor'.

Where's my proof? The US census. It provides us with data on the true 'median wage'...which is why most 24/7 Wall Street lists use the far more nebulous 'household wage' in their surveys of all things best and brightest.

Did you know the labor participation rate is lower than it was during WWII (and our working aged population has doubled since then?) How about the fact that the median wage is still hovering in the $25,000 a year rage...and remember, that means half of all workers make more and half MAKE LESS...and $25k is barely enough to keep a roof over your head or wheels under your backside (never mind insuring either one!)

DO you find these facts 'interesting'? Then perhaps you would enjoy reading my works...

Just saying, ya know.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Hand Waving

Greetings good citizen, Hand waving refers to the misdirection manipulators use to distract you from what they're really doing. Most people don't appreciate having their attention being brought to the very obvious fact they are being deceived but hey, it's another one of those some of the people, some of the time, sort of things and if you don't like it, stick it!

Crawling back on my proverbial 'soapbox' (I've been away for quite a while...but nothing's changed.) I'd like to, er, challenge the reasoning behind the latest misbegotten 'band-aid' being proposed for those forced by our odious management system to a life of perpetual penury.

Succinctly, the 'echo' of the proposal to raise the Federal minimum wage to $15.00 an hour. (effectively doubling what it currently is in most states.)

I started working around 1970 and the minimum wage was $1.50 an hour.

Are you beginning to see the problem here?

Raise the wage and guess what will happen...yup, prices will go up! What a shocker!

Next thing you know we'll have homeless people starving to death at $15 an hour...and the cry will be to raise the minimum wage to $20!

Rinse and repeat.

Wanna get off the foolish treadmill? You gotta attack the problem at its root, with the handful of people who have robbed their way to billionaire status.

No irony should be lost on the fact that these are the same people who claim to be the 'job creators'...when nothing could be further from the truth. You do what you do because you have to, just like the laws governing money were meant to be (abused.)

Wanna live indoors and eat regularly? Need money to do that and why? Because 'the law' will take your land, your children and even your freedom if you refuse to 'play the game'...

So, are the people running this turkeyshoot starting to look like a bunch of criminals? Well, everybody knows the answer to that one.

The real question is how do we get off this crazy train before they run it off a cliff (which we can all see coming?)

We all saw how the 'Occupy' movement ended, big fat zero...in fact, so ineffective as to lead one to suspect the whole thing was staged, just like the film, 'Wag the Dog'...

But hope can be drawn from a little incident that occurred up here in the North East, when a cousin weaseled control of a beloved chain of grocery stores from it's longtime chairman/manager.

Workers walked off the job and customers boycotted the store until Arthur T was restored to the helm. The event is unprecidented in modern history and just a glimmer of what we all know to be true.

United We Stand.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner, um, George, well, whatever.

Call to the post...

In a nearly eternal question that goes back into the mists of history, and you just know this question has been asked repeatedly so attribution is near impossible, we have to wonder, "if not us, who...and if not now, when?"

The last time an, er, 'public figure' invoked this historic question (I can't in good conscience use the term 'leader' when referring to this 'meat puppet') was just before the Berlin Wall fell during a time when, unbeknownst to the rest of us, the One Percent (and actually it's a much smaller number than that) seized the power of the media and declared war on democracy.

I know, crazy talk but they aren't even trying to cover up the fact that the 'justice system' is F.U.B.A.R. (and that's ignoring the uptick in police shooting, often unarmed, civilians and just walking away, free as a bird.)

Don't suppose this is related to our illegal invasion of foreign countries and 'conditioning' our troops to shoot unarmed civilians, is it?

Never mind how the government only seems interested in spying on YOU so they can, er, 'protect' the rest of us from, er, 'terrorists'.

Terrorists they breed with their tone deaf handling of foreign affairs.

It has often been said 'how fortunate is it for those that run the world's governments [The One Percent] that their constituents 'don't think'...(and if you doubt that then you haven't visited Facebook lately.)

Naturally, there is no direction to jump, nobody is holding up a banner to rally behind because nobody (besides my humble self) is offering an alternative to being enslaved and robbed by those who control 'money'.

Like Star Wars, the assumption is once we wrest control of our affairs our of the hands of the 'self-interested' that we'd toddle on with 'business as usual'...except that's not possible.

With the 'Easy Half' of our 'cheap and abundant' energy exhausted, those who hold the other end of the noose around your neck are aiming at a 'dial back'.

They intend to roll the social clock back to our 'previous model', the one were speaking out against the status quo would get you executed for 'heresy'.

Look at the media, the process of 'dumbing down has already begun! Last night I viewed an imaginary autopsy of a T-Rex!

(Why even go there?)

Imaginative, yes but thirty years from now they're going to claim it's real and you won't dare deny it!

But I digress. let us return to the shooting of civilians by those forced to perform multiple tours in the Middle East so they could earn money for college degrees so they'd qualify for jobs that no longer exist here in the USA.

Diabolical coincidence, right?

Better not say otherwise (think what you want) but you saw what happened to the Black Muslim in Boston that confided to friends that he...well, we don't know what was really said. We only have the 'official version' of his threats to 'behead' police officers.

How sad is it that we can only shuffle to the political right so far before our sons and daughters are goosestepping into the unfortunate lands that hold resources deemed vital to the One Percent's interests.

And nobody will dare speak against it, even as their own children return in bodybags...or worse, maimed for life and discarded by those who run the country they served with such valor.

Naturally, none of this ends well.

so we circle back to the beginning, if not us, who and if not now, when?

Wait just a little bit longer and it will be too late...and there are some who'd opine we've already left that goalpost in the rearview mirror twenty years ago.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner