The Prophecies of Baby Fatt

His stomach rumbled, and his bowels roared. A fetid aroma filled the room and Baby Fatt came forth with prophecy:

There is a city by the sea. In this city are many who have forsaken god. The residents of this city have placed before themselves false idols of materialism and conspicuous consumption. One day the populace will watch, bemused, as the sea recedes as if withdrawing from the city. Then, however, their bemusement will turn to horror as an enormous wall of water comes rushing toward their immoral city. Too late will they realize what is happening, and all will be lost as the gods take their vengeance.

So the next time a tsunami hits a populated area, don't forget that Baby Fatt prophesied it first.

This metropolis is home to artists, musicians, and storytellers. Its people work in many trades and have grown fat from abundance. In their self-satisfaction they have forgotten the importance of paying heed to the gods.

Soon, a day will come for the gods to take their revenge. The earth will shake and roar. The ground will open and many will be swallowed. Fire will spread and consume structure and being alike. Destruction on a scale seldom seen will be visited upon the ungrateful wretches who turned their back upon their gods.

Remember: the next time an earthquake hits a city, Baby Fatt prophesied it.

See the trick? Prophecy is easy. You look and the past and then infer that the same stuff's going to happen at some point in the future. You word it sufficiently vaguely to be able to take credit for it wherever or whenever what you've prophesied might occur. Thus is a prophet born.

Prophets are used-car salesmen. Those who buy their wares are idiots.

As for Baby Fatt--I gotta get me some of those vestal virgins.

The Putridity of Positive Thinking

Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book out that I highly recommend: Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion Of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. I couldn't agree more. One of the great diseases that haunts America like a fetid specter is positive thinking.

Ehrenreich begins her book by detailing her experience with breast cancer. Immediately after being diagnosed she got on the web to try to find facts, survivor stories, etc., and was immediately struck by an amazing amount of positive-thinking drivel about cancer. Idiocy to the effect that cancer was a blessing because it taught the sufferer to rethink one's life; how important it was to remain positive if one was to be cured; on and on the drivel spewed like some foul fount of anti-wisdom. An entire warm and fuzzy pro-cancer universe of pink ribbons and uplifting stories.

How I detest practicers of positive thinking. How it disgusts me to hear someone refer to something that's a problem as "not a problem, an opportunity!" No, idiot spawn of hell, you can call a problem a red shiny ball but it's still a fucking problem you insignificant piece of mildly sentient meat.

America is awash in positive thinkers. From managers who go on some weekend retreat and return talking about how "quality is the new paradigm" and "affirm it and you can have it" or "somebody moved my cheese"; to right-wing preachers who preach that Jesus wants you to be rich (memo to Christians: Jesus said that rich people don't go to heaven); to half-wit new-agers who maintain that you can have anything you want if you just visualize it (which means, alternatively, that if something bad happens to you--you know, like cancer--it's because you wished it upon yourself--what an evil premise). What a bunch of bunkum. What hogwash.

Someone recently commented to me that he found my blog to be a bit... well... negative. Negative? I'm the most positive person I know because my thoughts and feelings and ideas are firmly grounded in the world as it is not as one might wish it would be. I live according to what Nietzsche called amor fati: love of fate.

I would have nothing be different than it is: not by one jot. Every good thing, every bad thing, the beautiful Fall weather in Belle Plain, the pollution, all the terrible things people do to one another, all the joy that is to be found in love, good movies and music and books, the whole fucking shebang is just fine with me. I refuse to look at life through a fog of wishful thinking and absurd fantasy. It is those who try to turn their own pitiable lives into some sort of parable on the redemptive power of positive thinking who are negative because what could be more negative than to deny life as it really is?

Want to know what's going to happen in the future? It's easy: some good things will happen; some bad things will happen; and then you will die. Your death will likely be surrounded by pain and suffering that no amount of positive thinking can remove, but if you're lucky it won't last that long. After you're dead it will be as if you never really were, because everything goes on, but without you.

Positive? Perhaps not, but welcome to reality.

Lone Wolves and America the Sociopath

In the last 24 hours two lone wolf gunmen have struck America: one in Texas, one in Florida. Not to make too fine a point on the fact that a nation cannot criticize its citizenry for taking advantage of liberal gun laws to express a political point when that same nation allows anyone with a pulse to buy as much firepower as it would take to take a big lead-filled dump on the lives of the innocent, but this is becoming absurd: okay idiot religious/proletariat oaf filled with hate for everything America has done to you. Go away and just kill your own stupid self. Leave the rest of us alone. We are not your problem. We are your brothers and sisters.

Meanwhile, yet more stains on the vomit-filled bib of America.

For The Love of God Stop Breeding!

Nice article today in Salon about how Southwest Airlines forced a mom and a toddler off a plane because the idiot dolt of a mom couldn't make the idiot dolt of a rugrat shut its filthy pie hole (click on the title of today's blog post for the link). This has provoked the requisite outrage from all manner of parents--from new age yogurt heads to gun nut right wingers--about how terrible it is that society doesn't love children--and thereby families--as witnessed by this recent evidence of alleged intolerance.

I hate children and I hate families. The nuclear family is the cause--the root cause--of most societal problems. Just because two people want to breed does not give them--and their oafish spawn--the right force themselves on the rest of us.

If you want to breed, go ahead--hell, bacteria do it all the time so how hard can it be? But keep your trap shut and your boorish progeny the hell away from me.