Remembering Nelson Mandela

Unflinching and Unyielding to injustice under oppression and reconciliatory and forgiving towards your oppressors in triumph, those are the two shining guide-lights you brought to that dark world of racism and apartheid. And humanity could have no prouder son to be called "Tata", the father, of the new South Africa "Rainbow Nation".

Thank you for teaching us the virtue of forgiving. In forgiving, one liberates oneself from the oppressive & self-destructive yoke of hatred.

Yet we should never forget. In forgetting, we'll forsake all the lessons learned in vain.

Mr. Mandela.  R. I. P. #RememberNelsonMandela

On Supreme Court Decision on Defense of Marriage Act

The Supreme Court of The United States today struck a discordant note of social disharmony but necessary toll on the Liberty Bell towards the call for greater equality for humanity!

The True Meaning of Passover and Easter

Let's all celebrate the coming Pesach with the Jewish people in the sense that we, as a human race, will eventually celebrate our common Passover from the slavery of prejudice, intolerance and exclusivity.

And together, we will, one day, be celebrating the real renaissance message behind Easter, a resurrection in the recognition that we all are parts of the true brotherhood and sisterhood of Man.

A Few Birds in Hands . . .

Unless something strikes my fancy or tickles my funny bone, I think I'll return my full or more attention to the few birds in hands, three to be exact, than to all those other birds tweeting away in the bush.

I have been spending too much time on posting blogs, twitters and away from some books I've been working on. Hopefully, all of these fledglings will take on plumages of their assigned feathers and take to the air as one humming bird, one mocking bird and another one of the "Next Great American Novel" caliber, the most revered and majestic of all birds, the American White-crested Eagle. I hope one or two or all would occupy a permanent perch on the book shelves of the world's great libraries, the hearts and minds of common people.

Hey, dreams are free; I might as well dream big! A pound of humility, however, will only fetch you a penny's worth of virtue from the Vatican Euro or the Roman Dinero. ;-)

Pope Francis and the Roman Catholic Future

Holy Smoke! A couple of seagulls! Where in the world could these two seafarers have hailed from? From across the Emerald Sea? They alternatively perched on the Sistine Chapel's chimney which was used to signal the election of a new pope. They stole the scene right from a flock of birds of much brighter color and plumage gathering below to pick among themselves an important bird, a cardinal to be exact, which will be transfigured into a kingfisher by popular acclaim.

Some said it was an omen straight from heaven, the Holy Spirit incarnate, to bless the tweeting and twittering proceeding going on down below. Well, that was not quite a pure white bird, a dove to be exact, one would expect of the Holy Spirit. But that will do, in this age of global village, we are mostly drab mongrels and mutts anyway, not many of us can claim one comes from a family of pure breed or noble pedigree. Even the Holy Spirit must reflect the zeitgeist and diversity of our time. Count one to add to the existential angst of those true believers and faithful followers of Eugenics, the failed Adolf Hitler's monstrous dream of "master race" of pure Aryans.

The new Pope took on the regnal name of Francis, a la St. Francis of Assisi, according to the media. St. Francis of Assisi is the patron saint to birds and animals. He also bore the holy stigmata of Christ, the five wounds of Jesus’ passion, not to be confused with Mel Gibson’s passion for alcohol, anti-Semitic, anti-minority and misogynistic rants and his movie “Passion of the Christ”, a sadomasochistic film masquerading as a religious moral play. St. Francis also swore to a life of poverty and service to the down-trodden and found a monastic order that bears his name, the Franciscans. It was said when he was living the life of an ascetic hermit in the hill cave of Assisi, the birds and a wolf brought him food. His statue is often seen with a few birds perching on his shoulders, one bird in his hand, a wolf sitting by his feet, and more birds tweeting on the grounds and trees nearby.

On the other side of the world, there has also been a change of guard in China’s leadership; a new president was installed to govern the 1.3 billion or so of people. Therefore I also think that he also intended his chosen name to pay tribute to the other St. Francis, co-founder of the Jesuit order the new Pope himself belongs, St. Francis Xavier, a hint, maybe, to his intention to bring his pontifical mission to Asia, especially China, whose population rivals that of his faithful. St. Francis Xavier led extensive missionary expeditions to Asia, most notably in India, Japan, Borneo and the Molluccas. He was hoping to bring the Good Book to China when he died on an island off the China’s coast.

But judging from their BMI, rosy round cheeks and Rudolf, the reindeer’s noses, some princelings of the church by all appearance seem to lead a life of opulence and Chianti abandon. They might all claim to follow the footsteps of St. Francis, a looming figure in the Roman Catholic pantheon of saints, but their personal carbon footprints tell us otherwise. Our U. S. Congress would do well to take notice, you all leave footprints of some sort and we’ll be watching you.

The new pope was said to have an abundance of "fetching humility." But how much, in terms of U. S. dollars, Italian Euros or Argentinian Pesos would a pound of humility fetch, if it were just to be all style than substance? Will the Pope be a Servant to the poor and the infirm or an avid environmentalist to the birds and animals, as St. Francis was declared the patron saint of the environment? I hope he will do both. With one stroke in the cannon law, he can sanction contraception to ease the stress on our environment caused by exponential human population growth.

He can make optional clergy celibacy to attract more diversity of faithful that will only enhance the evangelist contribution and enrich the theological philosophy of the church and move it in steps with the time. He can also provide equal opportunity to women for priesthood to alleviate male priest shortage and bring in those other untapped 50% potential talents. Embrace and welcome our other brothers and sisters with alternate orientation into the church, are they not also the children of one same God? Finally, he should get the church out the money business by eliminating the Vatican Bank, a source of corruption in the Curia, and concentrate what the church does best, God's business, that of evangelism and charity work.

For those cynics who claim that "there will be poor always!” I offer a contrarian, Einstein's relativity view. On a relative scale, there will always be "poorer" people compared to others. But that doesn't mean their basic standard of living, basic health care needs and basic human dignity cannot be improved or uplifted to a higher level, just as human life span has improved with advances of science and technology.

Since the Papacy has been the self-appointed castellan of all human virtues, will the new Pope be more tolerant and slow to denounce all seemingly vices in the Holy See's all-clear seeing eyes? Will the new head of the Vatican see his fellow human all as potential sinners that need the Church's intervention in every aspect of their lives or as an intelligent equal who can make their own moral choices reasonably well in their own unique circumstances? Or will it still cling to the archaic view that all human are burdened with the "Original Sin" since the day of their conception, the sin of the "First Parents" visited upon the unborn and those yet to be born? Should the Church's doctrine continue to foster the negative self-image and inferior complex of a “born sinner” in children at such tender age, that all human race is to be put in such negative light to be abhorred and not to be respected?

We all can tell the difference between a vice from a sin. A sin is an abomination against your fellow sentient beings, be it an animal, plant or human. A vice is bad habit against oneself. Oftentimes the Church does not see the differences. Take for example, the seven deadly sins or cardinal sins: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. Although they are also known as capital vices, this proves exactly my point. Wrath would not harm anyone unless you lashed out at someone. Even God would do that sometimes, witness God’s wrath on Sodom and Gomorrah. Without greed you have no motivation for success, but greed at the expense of others is not a good thing. As for the rest, they are all self-inflicted masochistic excesses known to Freud as death wishes. If the vices and sins also happen to be also on your local penal codes, then they become crimes, punishable by your local court.

“You eat salad and steak, don’t you?” you ask, “How do they jive with what you are saying, in your opinion?” In Christian culture, they say grace and give thanks, presumably to God, not to the chopped lettuces or the slaughtered cattle, for the foods before they eat, thus absolving them from the sins of eating them. In Non-Christian cultures, they perform absolution rituals before an animal is slaughtered for food, either to a hunter’s god or to the spirit of the animal about to be slaughtered. For plant foods, such as corn and rice, they hold mid-autumn or harvest moon festivals to thank the mother-earth spirit for her abundance and providence, namely rice and corn.

So when does the vice part come in? When does the abomination part, the sinful part, happen? And where the crime part comes in? Ah, all good questions! They will all be explained in due course. If you were a shepherd and laid with a few sheep, and the sheep acted sheepish and did not show any distress, it would probably be a vice. If you felt or acted sheepish afterwards and the sheep acted with distress during the act, then it would be an abomination, a cardinal sin according to the Roman Catholic Cannon Laws. If you were caught in the act by a nosy, armchair law book practitioner, and this vice of yours was etched in stone on your local penal codes, then forget the vice and sin arguments you’d like to present to court, it would no doubt be a crime. Now you see the difference?

All the same, the Church is quick to condemn both and to pass eternal judgment. Should a teenager be condemned to a life time of fear of eternal damnation, overridden guilt and self-hate, just because he performs acts of self-love under the blanket just a tad too often, due to raging hormones? Therefore to condemn all vices is to condemn humanity. As the Nobel Literature Laureate, John Galsworthy, so wisely pointed out: “The true lover of the human race is surely he who can put up with it in all its forms, in vice as well as in virtue.” Pope Francis should learn some wisdom or two from his observation, to become a lover of human race or its detractor.

Until God, in His infinite wisdom, do away with the "Devil" or whatever “fall guy” we invented to pin our own failings and blames on, to hate all vices is to hate humanity. Detest the sins, not the sinners. "Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar," as the good book intones, so render to all humanity what belongs to them, their basic right to choose, to live free and equal access to opportunities now limited to a selected few, gender or classes.

But for those Catholics who want meaningful and immediate reforms to revitalize their church, time seems to be unbearable long for those who wait. It seems to some that the Holy See is still waiting for some "Divine Intervention." As they say, here on earth, God's work must truly be our own.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day for a little Irish in all of us!

A Conclave of Cardinals and a Gathering of Fowls

As the Roman Catholic cardinals sequestered (not to be confused with our Congress sequestering our money and holding our budget hostage) themselves in conclave to select the next Peter to fill the role of Jesus’s Fisher of Man, or rather Kingfisher of Man, on earth, the twitter-sphere have been flooded with tweeting, chirping and trilling of all kinds, including a few squawks and scolds. We have not seen such a huge avian gathering at one place since the date of Noah’s Ark. I am not talking about only those birds of the same feather or plumage either; beside cardinals, you also have all sorts of domestic fowls, waterfowls and wildfowls.


Some tweets are decent enough, positive and easy on the ears, such as those from the larks, canaries, song sparrows, nightingales and humming birds. Some emit harsh, critical and deafening squawks from the like of magpies, grouses and crows. Some tweeters even provoke unsolicited attacks from the like of mocking birds, nutcrackers and cuckoos, with a few loons thrown in the mix. With all these going on, you can sense a few raptors, such as chicken hawks, vultures and carrion crows, perching on the sideline branches, waiting for a chance to pounce on any weak tweets for a twitter kill. Amid all these chatters, tweets and twitters, all rules governing the pecking order are forgotten and ignored, mob rule rules.


In spite of all the talks about the next Kingfisher coming from Africa or Asia, I have a feeling that he will be a bird of paradise from the Emerald Isle, either from Oz or Ireland. I sincerely hope the next Pope will implement reforms such as contraception to control world population, celebration of sacraments by laymen or laywomen, and ordination of female clergy. I know what I propose may raise quite a few hackles among some conservative birds, or even causing them to flip a few birds. But what is good for the gander is also good for the goose, as they say. Or as a Chinese proverb so wisely states: let a hundred flowers bloom in whatever colors they choose, let a hundred birds tweet in whatever pitches they best manage.

Immigration Reform and the Bush Family Politics

"A [also 'one'] bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" - High Medieval English Proverb
"To Kill Two Birds with One Stone." - Ancient Chinese saying: "yi shi er niao" which literally translates to "one stone two birds".


Jeb Bush's recent published work on immigration reform, “Immigration Wars” together with his ghost writer . . . uh. . . co-writer, Clint Bolick, has so shaken up the political right not seen since Moses came across the "Burning Bush" on top of Mount Sinai. There God commanded Moses to carry out a similar immigration reform in the ancient lands of Egypt and Palestine. But Bush’s near double belly-flop entrance into immigration debate pool is viewed by some breathless right-wing pundits as a preamble into testing the campaign water for the run for presidency. Others were not so impressed nor pleased.

I hope those pundits are wrong on this, the Bush family already has two birds, one a fish hawk and another, a chicken hawk, in the presidential bush. Two is a company but three is a crowd, and that makes all those tweeting and trilling so much more irritating on the right-wing twitter-sphere and blogosphere. If true to his republican roots and an avid proponent of the failed “Reaganomics”, he would be another bad news a la his president brother, Dubuyah.

I don’t think this “Reaganomics” thing was thought up all by himself by Ronald "Just-Give-Me-a-Script, Oratory Magpie" Reagan, a third rated B-movie actor and an intellectual feather-weight. The Soviet economy was nearing the verge of collapse since Nixon's time, when he forged a new geopolitics alliance with Mao's China. The Soviets were a house long divided and would not stand for long. It finally self-imploded on its own corrupted communist system. Reagan simply took more credit than he was due and the Soviet collapse did not even happen on his watch.

His so-called "Reaganomics" policy also started the deregulation process that resulted in the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association debacle and the resulting savings and loan financial crisis. He squandered the budget surplus accumulated by previous administrations by going full steam on unnecessary arms race that swelled the ranks of generals and colonels, resulting in more chiefs than Indians in the Pentagon even to these days. Now it takes more than one general and two colonels to authorize to change a light bulb in the Pentagon, and a committee of them to change a toilet seat.

The Reagan arms buildup have resulted in more than enough missiles and warplanes to bomb the world three or five times over to "Thy Kingdom Come", and still have enough left to send the surviving generals, hunkered down in the underground cement bunkers deep under the Colorado Rockies, one-way tickets to Mars (I'm not talking about the Roman god of wars here, duh!) and beyond.

Although there is no documented direct evidence linking Ronald Reagan and his Vice President, George H. W. Bush, complicit in the Iran-Contra affairs. Given the then administration's pressing eagerness to resolve the Iran hostages and the Contra's right-wing insurgency in Nicaragua, and the magnitude of this undertaking, several sources in the intelligence grapevine murmured that Ronald must have acquiesced and Bush lent his "cloaks and daggers" connections and crafts he learned as a former head of the super spy agency, the CIA. So they went ahead to kill the two birds with one stone. Often as it so happens in life: Man proposes but God disposes. The Iran-Contra venture went awry, leaving one Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the lead in this Reagan’s anti-Sandinista cum "weapons for Iran hostages" shenanigan, caught red-handed with one bird in hands while the other escaped into the bush.

Ben Affleck should have included this scene in his movie "Argo." Although he was not nominated for “Best Director”, he would have won the "co-Best Director" together with Ang Lee at the Oscar Award ceremony by universal acclaim. I know this scene would be chronologically incorrect. Hey, it's Hollywood! What do you expect? You would have heard Colonel North gritting his teeth and uttered that Argo-memorable line under his clenched-jaw breath: "Reagan and Bush, Argo #*%& yourself!" amid those thick and thorny Nicaraguan bushes. I can guarantee you those hashtag and other symbols were not bird talks either. No tweeting or trilling in the bushes there, it sounds more like a crow's scold.

Even Reagan and President George H. W. "Read-My-Lips, No-More-Taxes" Bush, when presented with black and white arithmetic, agreed to raise revenues to balance the budget. If we keep cutting back on spending without complimentary increase in revenues (Do you know most big corporations don't pay a penny in tax?), our government food inspectors will be so overwhelmed and we will wind up with the European version of bushmeat or worse, in our grocery markets. We'll find not only horse meat but also Texan armadillo road-kills mixed in with our hamburger, the quintessential American soul food. It adds a whole new meaning and flavor when you order your next "I'm lovin' it!" BigMac!

This Reaganomics flowered or deflowered (depending on your partisan, biological or moral points of view) on the watch of President George "Dubuyah" Bush. His further refinements of those "voodoo economics" (it is his dad’s, H. W.’s words) un-caged the raptor of greed in his contributors from Wall Street and participated the second worst financial and economic crisis the world has ever seen. So let not beat around the bushes here, our country has gotten more than our worth to handle two birds in hands than the remaining one bird in the bush. It stands to reason that we should adopt a constitution amendment to ban all future Bushes to run for president in order to flush all those presidency-aspiring birds still in the Bush with one stone. Sounds logical? I would like to think so. It is called poetic justice.

Congratulation on Ang Lee for his Academy Award for Best Director!

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Abdication of Pope Benedict XVI

“Religious people scare me, but spiritual people inspire me!” – Unknown.

It is quite a surprising piece of news from the Holy See, not many people see it coming, do you? Who is next going to head this venerable institution founded by Peter and Paul? Mostly by Paul, if I may say so. I'm not robbing Peter to pay Paul here. Peter was the symbolic head of state while Paul was doing all the footwork, leaving his personal footprints all over Asia Minor and the Levant coasts. He ventured even as far as Rome. His handiworks still influence the thinking of the Church’s fathers to this day. The question now facing the Vatican is who has the anti-reformative cold feet to fill those satin-lined Fisherman's Sandals?

If you dabble in astrology and a fan of Nostradamus, the next supreme Pontiff is believed to be “from the new crescent moon”. Probably a cardinal from the Middle East country? Or from a country when the new crescent moon first appears in ascendance when the Conclave of Cardinals sequesters itself behind closed doors to select the next new piece of “Rock”, upon which Jesus would build his church?

But what a little piece of rock that is, the Vatican! It is a piece of paradise here on earth, if you ever see one. It is filled with so many heavenly art treasures that will reap the Holy Father an immeasurable earthly sum . . . if he chooses to liquidate them. Ah, the architecture that is St. Peter’s Basilica, lifts human spirit a-soaring to a new height of sensual pleasure that Michelangelo and Bernini once had experienced.

What is the relevancy of the Papacy to our world today? His Holiness’s spiritual grasp on the hearts and minds of his flock is still indisputable and palpable, but his temporal power will no longer inspire terrors and fears on the world's body corporal he once had with inquisitions and social castrations. His anathemas can no longer be cast further than the confining walls of the Vatican. His excommunication edicts can now be sidestepped in this age of Facebook and other social media. It turns out that the current Pope, Benedict, with an unfortunate moniker of "God's Rottweiler" given by a media pundit, has no canine teeth or he has long been defanged. Or he simply has been wearing dentures for all these years but had been kept in secrecy by the Curia Romana. Well, the end result is that his barks have been worse than his bites and had been found barking up a wrong tree at times.

He may still claims to be the castellan of all human virtues, custodian of millions of Roman Catholic souls and lord of all that little piece of rock he surveys. But marriage between religion and state has always been a bad idea, many crusades and holy wars have been born of this unholy union.

How do we improve the image and social standing of the Church in this age of PRs and media spins? The devil is in the detail, as they say. I have called on God's liaison officer, the Archangel Gabriel, for his Boss's comment on the current state of His Church.. Many attempts have been made but my calls so far have not been returned.

On the personal note, I wish the Holy Father well and hope he will find peace and personal redemption in his new life of contemplative prayers and private devotions. Personal preservation, not self-sacrifice, will go a long way to . . . well, preserve oneself. Heaven can wait. . . His legacy and achievements will be discussed and debated by the historians and the world at large for years to come.

There have been many discussions on the future role of the Pope. I think he'll be given the title "Pope Emeritus of the Holy See”, you see, not to be confused with "Papa Emmett" who lives across the Emerald Sea. Who is Papa Emmett, you ask? I don't know, probably from OZ or Ireland. He just happens to rhyme. . . (The "Devious Poet" strikes again!). The truth is, he will be hidden away in one of the abbeys doting the Lateran Hill and will spend the rest of his life as an anonymous penitent. Just like you can't have two crouching tigers marking their territories on the same hillock, as a Chinese philosopher once so wisely observed, you can't have two popes peddling salvation in the same 'hoods on "Roma's Seven Hills."

Religion, as well as government, provides the spiritual and temporal frameworks and support systems that fulfill some of our basic human needs. The needs to belong, to associate, for mutual aid, for identity and for security are universal in all of us. Like an automobile, they are good instruments or means that serve those ends. Like an automobile, they need fine tuning and part upgrade from time to time and a good and responsible chauffeur put in place to take the helm.

However, ever so often, those whom we put in the driver's seat abuse, misuse or even betray that trust, that lead some people to become spiritually cynical and politically apathetic. You shouldn’t blame the vehicle. That shouldn't be. The Church that Jesus built was a fine piece of transport system that moved us from barbarism to civilized society. So, all we need is to actively participate, to fine tune those systems and put in place wise, conscientious people with integrity to guide, govern so that the original messages and principles of the founders will not be lost in translation or misrepresentation.

After the Pope and the Queen of Netherlands, could the Queen of Shakespeare's Land be far behind? Charles has been waiting to get into that “uniform a la king” that got tucked away and stacked so high in his highness's attic for so long that it is now unfit for his girth but fit for the Tower of London Museum display. Give the poor bonny Prince of Wails a chance, eh Lizzy?

My Prophetic Ways with Poems and Blog Posts

Some of my discerning and discriminating friends pointed out to me that some phrases and words in my poems and blog posts are quite prophetic, if you know where to look. Some of you certainly do, with the fervor like a newly converted zealot.

I'm here to set the records straight. There is nothing hocus-pocus going on here. If you draw back the great curtain of Oz, you will find only a wizard of words, (modesty temporarily dispensed with here) pulling levers and pulleys to assemble alphabets and words on a great Scrabble board of life.

On the other hands, I can't guarantee that the additional stage props and backdrops were not put there by my Muse to enhance and liven up the ambiance a little bit . . . but who knows? . . . ;-)

Happy Chinese New Year to All!

Our Current Crops of Congressmen and Women

Most of the current crops of Congress members are providing me with a lot of inspirational fodders for practicing my gun-firing salvos of political satires. Don't you just love them? Most of them are a bunch of frustrated former law-book practitioners, consummate escape clause artists and problem non-solvers. And last but not least, with a few failed third-rated theatre / mummery performers thrown in the mix.

Judging from yesteryear harvests, and knowing that leopards never change their spots, the current crops also include a strange ménagerie zoo of downright alien and unapologetically un-American beasts, all on H-1B working visas with temporary stay in Congress. These include many certifiable "Just-Hanging-Around" legislative sloths, "Acting-Career-Transference" oratory magpies, "Hooked-On-Their-Own-Conviction" intellectual Jackasses, "Charge-At-All-Cost-20/40 Hind-Sight” visionary rhinoceroses and "Burying-The-Head-In-The-Sand" reality-checker Ostriches.

Take, for examples, that former Rep. Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin of Missouri, one GOP Senate candidate Richard “God Intended” Mourdock of Indiana and current Republican congressman Phil “Partly Right” Gingrey of Georgia, a former obstetrician-gynecologist, no less. These three clueless Stooges of misogynistic ignoramuses, and dying breed of anachronistic moral tyrannosauruses! (Nothing works me up like a charm to lighten up my present dour mood like a couple of rhymes, if you must know.)

They also secretly belong, I am led to believe, to the “silent majority” of Congressmen and women who are the loosest, trigger-happiest, most pro-NRA shootists, if you ever saw one, or three, or groups! These people shoot junks from both ends of their body orifices while spewing out their high moral wisdom nuggets from their bully pulpits like a tribunal of supreme religious pontifices. Many have that "devil-may-care", “screw-the-taxpayers” attitude, voiding their scats and dungs all over the place on our ship of state, leaving the taxpayers holding the mop and broom to pick up the “tabs”.

You can also spot the same symptomatic displays of these kinds of behaviors on some air-tube talking heads, air-wave pundits, mag-rag experts and paper-rag gurus. Well, some of them are actually mirror twins of those political types mentioned above, with no less irrelevant and irreverent chatterbox ménage à trois the like of Rush "OxyContin-Induced-Rush" Limbaugh, Sean "Finicky-Not-So-Truth-Picky" Hannity, and Ann "Anti-Current-Culture" Coulter, to name a few. Don’t they make strange unlikely bed fellows even in this age of live reality show? I’d like to think so.

However, it's unfair to lump up all members of Congress and other public servants whose integrity and hearts are in the right place in one same category. They are few and far between. Here are a few that come to mind. Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is an independent thinker and straight shooter and has a lot of good ideas on our current pressing issues about tax and Wall Street reforms, Citizens United, entitlements, balancing budgets and deficit reduction. Newly elected Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is another promising and yet untested one; I pinch a lot of hope on her.

On the public service side, former Big Apple's Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and now retired Secretary of State is worthy of our gratitude for her years of service to our great nation's causes and her answer and dedication to the call of duty. Senator John "Maverick" McCain, despite a promising start, turned out to be a little disappointment. I hope he'll get back to his old grooves and put country first and his own interests second when comes to serving our country, as he did so well during our unfortunate war in Vietnam. I'll call these men and women "statesmen and women" to distinguish them from the other nasty bunch, the quintessential "politicians".

Ah, politicians, what are we going to do without them!? Politics are dirty business. Only real stinko-philiacs dare to venture off to this miasma of obnoxious blow-offs and blow-hards! One can only wonder and flatulate. Uh . . . postulate!

(Note: flatulate, an intransitive verb, a coined, derivative verb from "flatulence", a non-abstract noun probably derived from a high Medieval Latin word "flatus". Now you know the rest of the story . . . and here you are. . . at the end of my post!. . . Ppuff!!!) ;-)

Congratulation on President Obama 2nd Inauguration

"Success is knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others." -- Unknown

What is known is the purpose set forth by our country's Constitution regarding our president's and our Congress's roles in our lives. In order to reach the full potential vested in their respective offices, they must remember they are there to serve, and to seek out the common ground and work towards for this country's Greater Good. Let us begin then, on this auspicious day, the 2nd Inauguration of President Obama, we wish them success and a new spirit of cooperation to move this country forwards. And a grateful nation will remember the legacies they leave behind.

Let us also give thanks, on this day, to the legacy the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King had left on the country’s honor roll of men and women who have contributed greatly to the betterment of our countrymen.

An Apologist Poem for Emma Lazarus

Too often in our recent history, our Congress has forgotten the true spirits of America as incarnated in Emma Lazarus' famous poem: to care for the poor, homeless and huddled masses on our own teeming shores.

The cynical among us will dismiss all these as a Lotus eater's pipe dream, a Pollyanna's rosy lens view of our world. It is a Utopian world that cannot be achieved in this earthly realm. Ideals are half-awaken ideas of a daydreamer, they say, conceived out of the hazy mist of their REM sleep.

To these I offer a contrarian view. If you look through the window of history, you can see the domino-falls of Dictatorship, once deemed an impossible dream by the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. You can see a parade of dictatorships, may it be religious, imperial-colonial, monarchial, Fascist, patriarchal, sectarian, genocidal or plutocratic, all fall and will eventually fall before the march of Democracy. Sometimes these daydreamer's ideals do come true.

However, a true democracy can only survive and be sustained through an Informed Democracy, a democracy where an informed, educated and participatory public are actively involved in their country’s electoral processes. A democracy without an informed and educated public to adopt sensible egalitarian laws is a mob rule. A democracy where the minority voices are silenced is a dictatorship by arithmocracy. A democracy hijacked by special interests is tyranny imposed by a few on the country’s multitude. The antidote to anti-democracy undercurrent is a well-informed, educated, participatory public.

It was no wonder whenever a dictator came to power, the first thing he wanted to seize control was the mass media, the very incarnation of the Freedom of Speech. And now, his present-day equivalent, a demagogue, fears the most is his followers' exposure to the truth and contrarian views from the mass media; that is why you will find him frequently assaulting the mass media as not representative of his imaginary "Silent Majority".

Show me a "Silent Majority" and I'll show you a mute opera singer. They don't exist!
A majority may be silent in actions at first. A social quake is always preceded by a lot of disgruntled rumblings before it erupts into protests and riots. Any government should be well advised to put their fingers on the social pulses.

But most of current crop of lawmakers are too convicted of their own moral certitude and/or too intoxicated with lobby money to have the empathy for the average, disfranchised Americans. Our government, as it stands now, is a virtual plutocracy. Look at the influence our big corporations, big money and lobbyists exerted on our Congress.

So, to borrow a few words and spirits from her famous poem, I wrote the following doggerel to show the current political ethos of the voters:

Rise! You disfranchised, working-class thrall,
You tired, over-taxed masses must address
And stand with one voice to command our Congress:
"Give us your coin-tossed, poor lawmakers all,
They surely will not like what is in store,
We hold the key to the Congress's Exit Door!"

Butterfly Effect, Fiscal Cliff, Wall Street and Representative Government Redux

Even though our esteemed Congress has just passed a stop-gap measure, America will continue its slide down the Financial Graph Curve towards the Fiscal Cliff, dropping off into an Economic Crevasse and hitting the Monetary Debt Ceiling on the way down, finally winding up through a spending-cut Sequester Wringer.

The “do-nothing” Congress finally did something. Why? Partly because they don’t want to lose, comes next election, the perks and prestige their jobs bring. And partly, I think, some heavyweight fat cat moguls of various stripes and BMIs, after watching with terrifying alarm as their investment portfolios start shriveling up like their little johnnies after a 4-hour Viagra high with their favorite "street-walker interns", called up their indentured representatives in Congress. (Personally, I have more respect for these streeters than some Wall-Streeters, at least they make their hard-earned money the old fashioned way, through manual and uh . . . physical labor.)

In another arena, the same pressure was also mounting for some top brasses in the Pentagon, this Sequester thing was giving them some gastrointestinal problems; this would greatly affect their under-the-table lobbying they were doing for some defense contractors. Now if they couldn’t deliver a bigger slice of the Congressional spending pie, this would give them an anal-explosive complex in addition to their attendant occupational hazard, the military-industrial complex. No amount of psychoanalysis or therapies will solve that. Well, forget about Freud, they decided to take the anal-explosive matters in their own soiled hands and picked up the hot-line, a direct link to their cohorts in the Congress.

The masters summoned and the Congressmen or women obliged and performed their well-rehearsed, two-steps-forward and one-step-back bargaining dance, "Gangnam Style”, around the Cliff’s brink, temporarily slowing the slide. Now they are congratulating and patting each other on the back for their virtuoso performance for saving the day. To them it was all song and dance, but it was a bad imitation at best and a corrupted version at worst, of the inimitable master, PSY. And they know it. They are supposed to be our public servants, but instead they have become indentured servants to the fat cats.

As for the real tax-payers, they are completely psyched out, after holding their breath in suspense for so long and watched the one-trick dog and pony show in Washington with amazement, disbelief and disgust.

Meanwhile, the fat cats’ Wall Street cronies have a more pressing problem. This fiscal stress also gave them an anal problem. But they got the worse end of the complex spectrum deal, the anal-retentive complex. This gives me a reason to suspect that the much discredited Freud might be partially right. The potty trainings must be radically different for these two archetypes during their crucial formative years. So these Wall-Streeters will continue their pants-wetting (liquidating their hedge fund derivatives). And from time to time they will let out a collective, knee-jerk fart (dumping some of their self-appraised, value-inflated, stock portfolios). Those are some spittle and a lot of smoke, to be sure, but no cigars. What is a fella to do with all those private unwanted holdings? I'm not talking about stock and commodity options or pork and beans futures here. Well, nothing much. One can only sympathize. But I'm digressing.

Anyway, this letting out of hot airs from Wall Street will give rise to gale-force wind warnings in the rest of the financial world. These little puffs of smokes emanating from Wall Street will gather strength and become a series of jet-stream blasts of tsunami winds, riding the Occidental Arctic Express, made more severe by global warming (don’t get me started on that now) to buffet (et tu Warren? Just say it ain't so!) the rest of the world. These north-easterlies will suck up and freeze-dry any liquid assets in their paths. You have heard about the air guitar players, some of these Wall-Streeters are basically air stock players. They are playing some investors for gullible fools.

The antidote to all these is simple, plug up all those fart-holes, I mean all the loop-holes. That means reform Wall Street, modify the tax codes, enforce strict restrictions on political lobbies, nullify the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United Vs. Federal Election Commission” decision and clean up both chambers of the current Congress, nooks and closets all!

Now you tell me, if these are not the real "Butterfly Effect", America’s economic prowess and "representative" government in action or what?

In the "mean"time, have a happy and a preposterous New Year! Uh, I mean a pre-prosperous New Year for now, until these tsunami winds blow over!

With regards, PFJChow.