Tag Archive | politics

Dante, Health, Freedom of Political Speech

Nov2

A lot of thoughts swirling around my head today. Some of you may have heard of the concept of being “red pilled.” Basically that’s just a quick way of saying a person has heard and/or researched and become to believe that the unofficial, other side, of the story is true. Many, many people are having this experience today in all aspects of life, and, honestly, I’m not sure where it’s going to end. It’s an exciting time to be alive. My thoughts today circle around this idea of waking up to the truth. It’s hard to talk to people about these things, and there’s still a lot of resistance to truly examining things in life: It’s tiring, you don’t know who to believe after awhile, and there’s always a little worry that you’re being fooled…again.

The Dante Chamber. I enjoy Matthew Pearl’s writing, though it is often quite gruesome. Due to gruesomeness, it wasn’t so easy to read his popular The Dante Club, but I got through it, as the murder mystery was interesting, the detectives were well known literary figures of the 1800s, and it was information on Dante Aligheri’s works, specifically his Divine Comedy, in which the poet travels through hell, purgatory, and then paradise. I was unaware just how obsessed some artists and writers are with Dante’s works, maybe not so much today, but in years past. The Dante Club dips a bit into that obsession, but The Dante Chamber really gives one the full concept, and…it’s tedious.

Christina Rossetti is one of my favorite poets, so I was excited to learn that she’s one of the lead detectives in The Dante Chamber. Despite liking her works, though, I really don’t know much about her or her life, just that she was a very religious person. I didn’t know that her father was so obsessed with Dante that it drove him crazy, and that her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had a similar obsession. That’s where my interest in the story ends, though, because, on a mystery level, The Dante Chamber fails to deliver. Much time is spent in mulling over Dante, his works, obsessions with Dante, etc., but there’s little progress towards actual detective work, even from the very interesting police detective. Christina escaped from the obsession, that’s the key point, and I am glad for her. And although I’m sorry that both Robert Browning and Dante Rossetti lost the women they loved, I don’t really want to read a whole book about them dealing with their grief. I want to read a riveting and insightful murder mystery.

Read The Dante Chamber only if you’re really interested in Dante’s works and the obsession around it. The Dante Club was a lot better, in my opinion, as were Pearl’s other works, The Poe Shadow (my favorite), and The Last Dickens. Pearl is one of my favorite contemporary writers, but some of his stories are interesting, and some just not.

Health. Talk about an aspect of life in which it’s hard to trust! Health and what makes us healthy, from how much sleep we need, to the food we eat, is a topic that will we debated until the end of time. Every body has a different idea or opinion, and that makes sense, because every body is different. My body is not like your body, your body is not like your neighbor’s body, and so on. Red pills on this topic aren’t so much about learning new information as learning information that’s been purposely hidden over time, for various reasons, but many of them, strangely political.

My own red pill journey on this subject started with looking into vaccines. Much of true information on vaccines has been obscured or lost, or more alarmingly, deliberately pushed out of the proverbial town square by corporations with other interests in mind, namely money. Some would say it is vaccines making us so sick these days, along with other toxins in our foods and environment. After looking into people’s objections to the jabs, it has been difficult for me to say they are good for us, or at least as good for us as they are promoted to be. In trying to talk about vaccines with others, I realized quite quickly that many people don’t want to question them and prefer that what they have been told about them is the truth. It was the anger that surprised me the most, and I still don’t know what to make of it. My conclusion is that, generally, looking at the other side of the vaccine debate is something people must do individually. I can’t convince them one way or another. At most, I can point them to where to start if they do have questions and decide to start a journey that can turn one’s way of thinking upside down.

It was only natural that my next interest was looking into diet, and here, the truth, or at least the other side, has found some headway. Due to gluten and diary intolerance, people have become increasingly skeptical of the nutritional guidelines put upon us by the government, the medical industry, and others. After so long of not feeling well, many are trying out alternative medicine and alternative diets, and many of them are having success. Enter the carnivore diet, basically eating only meat and animal products, probably the opposite of the enshrined food pyramid and guidelines, as well as even the opposite of what people have previously done to say, alternatively beat cancer. It’s like a red pill for a red pill, and oh, so fascinating. I have been trying this diet–not full force–and I have felt better, had more energy, etc., but still there’s doubt with it, and ultimately it’s hard to know who or even what studies to trust.

Maybe vegans are right, for example. Or, maybe it’s better to eat everything in moderation? But, what does that even mean? Having equal parts of water, salt, and apples? It’s kind of a meaningless saying when it comes down to it. Eating animals products only, isn’t easy, either, because the goal is to have the best quality of these things, which aren’t often found at the grocery store, but that I hope someday will be. Anyway, it’s truly a brave new world that people like Frank Tufano on Youtube or Nina Teicholz with her The Big Fat Surprise book are opening up. They are only part of this next step in our nutritional awakening. Now, it’s generally agreed on by most that too much sugar is bad for you! That’s amazing, considering it was once promoted as being so much better than red meat or anything with fat in it. We are increasingly becoming skeptical of manmade, cheap food products that we now realized have little nutritional value and are often making us sick. With carbohydrates and/or grains, I’m seeing the same consensus, people are starting to acknowledge we eat too much of these things, and they are not, in fact, very good for us. A few years ago, the Adkins diet was popular, then shamed seemingly out of existence, and now many people are finding health success on little or no-carb diets like the ketogenic diet and the carnivore diet.

Because of the success of these alternatives, for me and others, it is increasingly difficult to trust that especially the medical establishment has the truth. We are now aware of how much money they stand to lose if their pill-based care should flounder, even if they are not yet aware of it. Here and there, the truth, or an least alternative views on healing and nutrition are being suppressed by what we can call Big Pharma, but I think it’s a losing battle for them. The more one tries to stamp something out, the more curious people are likely to be about it. Better would be to get ahead of the trends and present new research on the topics. Recently, there was an article about meat, vaguely indicating that we don’t really know if it’s good or bad for one to eat on a regular basis. While not exactly a white flag on the issue, it’s a warning cry to everyone that things may soon be changing. I don’t think people will be so upset at being lied to in the past as much as they’ll be eager to have the foods that will give them true health. This is where capitalism can be at its best: If the consumer demands high quality foods, even animals foods, unless we have a complete totalitarian government, things will change. We will find the quality foods coming back to the stores eventually. It may take a lot longer, however, for the idea of a pill fix or even vaccine fix to die out.

Still, I have to wonder what the next fad diet will be. Will that diet upturn everything that came before it? Sometimes it seems like nutritional and health red pills will never end. But every body is different, and I think that’s the trick, finding ways that people can really find out what works best for their own bodies. Should we eat for our blood type, for example? Or should we focus on foods grown where we live? There’s so possibilities that sometimes it makes my head spin. The awesome reality is, though, that largely our bodies do have the capabilities to heal themselves of many things, only they need the proper fuel to do so.

Freedom of Political Speech. This is getting long, but I really must continue, because it’s relevant for today. Even as a kid, I vaguely understood that America’s commitment to free speech wasn’t about allowing rude language or pornography. I knew it had a lot to do with politics and government. After watching the likes of Stephan Molyneux, moving on to reading Vox Day, getting clued in to Qanon, and in short order following and reading Neon Revolt, it has become clear to me that free speech is about politics more than anything else. People aren’t going to die on the field of battle in order to use the F word, but plenty might if it means they can question the rulers and authorities over them without, perhaps ironically, a death sentence.

Is free speech actually a myth? Perhaps. I can think of many things that I wouldn’t support freedom in, and I’m sure you can, too. I now think that freedom to speak one’s mind is tied to authority and how that authority behaves. Our first amendment was always about censoring the government’s behavior towards its citizens, but we often forget that. The difference in my view today, is that if we do indeed have the truth, it’s ok to insist on that and speak freely about it. We have as much right to insist on that as do those who would force, say, diversity upon us. It’s a change in thinking after being told for many, many years that the more conservative side of the spectrum must continually tolerate and give way to all manner of degeneracy. This doesn’t mean that the degenerate can’t speak their minds, but it doesn’t mean that we are allowed to say and stick up for the truth. Speaking the truth is vital, more important that trying to be “nice.” Allowing lies to prosper is not at all nice, nor loving. The truth hurts, but can also be the very best news in the world, as believers in Jesus Christ know.

If this sounds all very muddled, I’m sorry. I’m still thinking these things through, and I am by no means a genius. It has been alarming to see how those who proclaim inclusivity allow for everything except the truth, allow every view except the Christian one, and how especially online censorship against the “right” views, if you will, has skyrocketed. The truth will always be persecuted by a fallen world, but I think young people are confused by how quickly the Church as a whole is caving to worldly views and how much the “go along to get along” attitude is entrenched in, say, the Republican party. It has come to light that many of these seemingly “nice” organizations are merely in it for the money. Red pills, disillusionment. These people may not swear or use porn, but they are selling lies, which might be ultimately worse.

Enter, the chans, the wild west boards of the internet. They are places where people flock to talk about things they can’t talk about anywhere else. But at 4chan, and now 8chan, it’s a strange dichotomy, with free political speech in one part, and freedom of mudslinging, vulgarity, pornography, and the like, in other parts. On these boards is where Qanon, anon meaning anonymous, for everyone’s anonymous on the chans, first appeared, laying out question after question, getting people to research the history they thought they already knew. Q was reaching people already disillusioned by the “official story” of things. They saw that, for example, Donald Trump, was speaking truth during his campaign for 2016 and they saw how those elites in authority did their level best to make sure he wouldn’t win the presidency, even going so far as to promote physical violence against his supporters.

Q, whether real or someone playing a role, has hope as the goal. Is Q merely a rallying point for Trump’s supporters and his 2020 run? I don’t know, and I largely don’t care, because he or they, whoever they may be have incited many in the best way: to seek the truth, not just sometimes, but all the time. It is admirable in an age when we’re encouraged to question nothing and rely only on so-called experts and official stories. Now Q is certainly human and has faults, but if he, she, or they is bent on hoodwinking people, they are going about it in the worst possible way, as they continue to tell people to question and to research everything. Q also says to “trust the plan,” but I think few Q followers are putting absolute faith in Q. Mostly, they just want the criminals to be prosecuted and for all their crimes to see the light of day. They see Trump working on that, and those same criminals feverishly trying to stop him and the Q movement.

Because the mainstream media and powers that be have failed miserably at cutting off either Trump or Q, their fight now is focused on stamping out alternative views on the internet. This shows how weak their position is, and they, too, struggle with the freedom of speech aspect. They must be panicking, knowing their movement is rapidly becoming something Robespierre would approve, with little ability to stop it. And so, we have the very odd circumstance of 8chan possibly being set up with programmed characters posting there about shooting certain groups of people and then going and doing just that, all in order to get 8chan shut down. Odd, because manifestos and proclamations like that can be found all over the internet, but only the sites that speak political truth, or, rather, anti-progressive truth, are targeted to be shut down: 8chan, Gab, and the like.

So, 8chan got shut down for a time, and the owner, Jim Watkins, had to testify in front of Congress, and anons have been waiting and waiting for the site to be back online because that’s the only place that Q posts. Not only that, the original founder of 8chan has been trying to shut the whole thing down, using nefarious tactics. “Hot wheels” as he’s called, proclaims a cross in his twitter, but, like many who do that, is acting not befitting to that cross. In contrast, Watkins, who has been doing everything to his site get up and running again, has been singing Christian songs on his Youtube channel. Neon Revolt has the non-mainstream take on all of this, and you can read his article here. Bizarre doesn’t begin to describe it.

I don’t what actually to think about all of this, but it’s very entertaining and important today, as 8chan, or now 8kun is supposed to be up and running if not yet, within the hour. Will Q post? All the Q followers are wondering, me included. Not sure where this red pill ride will end, but it’s a lot of fun, even though it’ll make your head spin. For a Christian, all of the questioning and not knowing who to trust, only leads back to one absolute truth: The Almighty God, our Creator, and the good news of His Son, Jesus Christ, as our Savior from sin, death, and the devil, is the only thing we can truly trust in this dark, messed up world. It is the truth that matters most, and many people are waking up to this, the biggest red pill of all time. We cannot save ourselves, no matter how much we might want to.

Agatha Christie and Qanon

Oct17

Agatha Christie is one of my go-to authors. Her mysteries are often second to none and great adventures to boot, as her characters often travel to exotic places. Most of her stories can be read in one sitting, and most are more than mysteries: they give us her insights into human nature as well as quiet, no frills love stories.

That being said, she has a few misses, at least in my opinion. I don’t care for her Harley Quin stories and some of her stories that are political spy thrillers. However The Man in the Brown Suit is my absolute favorite by her, and as I’m going to read that again soon, I’ll be sure to do a review later on. This week I read Passenger to Frankfurt and though I enjoy politics and spies, I found this story tedious and difficult to follow.

When this happens with an author I like, I often try to finish the book anyway and find something to enjoy about it. Strangely enough, the violent, anarchic world revolution happening in the book has similarities to the violence and anarchy happening in our world today. Christie refers to certain people of wealth being behind violent youth movements that think they are going to change the world, but really are only puppets for those with power who want more of it.

This has a lot to do with what the elusive Q or Qanon shares with followers on the 8-Chan boards. If you don’t know about Q, I highly recommend at least brushing up on it, as for good or bad, this Qanon is influencing a lot of people. We are all hoping the Q team is on the side of good and he/they appear to be working in conjunction with President Trump in order to get information out by bypassing the media. Q posts questions, phrases, codes, essentially, and asks anons (the anonymous users of 8-chan) to research people and their connections to power, trafficking, crime, and the like.

Despite the Q phenomenon being painted like a cult, the point of it seems largely to get people to think for themselves, to do their own research, and really to realize how much they are lied to and how much is purposefully kept hidden from them by the media. It is also has been a great boost for Trump and MAGA supporters, especially those who find following politics via legal moves and C-Span rather tedious and boring. Researching death and sex cults will always be more interesting. In recent weeks, some Q followers have gotten frustrated that there’s been no fantastic arrests of all the evildoers yet or that we aren’t fighting a physical war yet, or something. People are bored again, because politics, research, and the like, it’s not glamorous or exciting. It’s tedious, dogged work, and one often has to take the longer route when the shorter would be far more exciting.

In consequence the Q team, too, seems a bit down. No one’s seeing the amazing things that have already happened–the true exchanges of power happening in the USA and the world–and are only focusing on what hasn’t happened yet, and frankly, what may never happen. The “wheels of justice are slow,” Q says, and they understand the followers’ frustration.

So how does this connect with Passenger to Frankfurt and Agatha Christie? Well, the story is essentially about a group of people, spies, trying to stop a violent world movement. It is the same thing, old rich people stirring up the young. The young think they are fighting for good and that their violent overthrowing of everything will eventually bring about some kind of utopia. We have seen this in countless revolutions throughout the ages, but it is only the rich and powerful who win in these movements, for they are safe from the violence and get away with instigating crimes while the young get batoned, tear gassed, and arrested. And the utopia never comes, because it’s all about more power or new power for certain people.

At one point in the story, someone draws a diagram showing how so many things are connected or controlled by the same rich people, the same 13 families or Illuminati of conspiracy yore: finance, armament, art, the drug trade, the sex trade, slavery etc. Q research has shown many that the same groups of people (think George Soros) are pulling the strings behind, well, almost everything. It’s unsettling to find that certain people have so much power. Who do they think they are? That’s the question. Do they think they are gods or what?

Christie envisions one such person as a very old, fat woman who has every indulgence and only surrounds herself with beautiful young people all eager for the revolution. This revolution is connected largely to Hitler of WW2 fame, and its hinted that these people are yet again trying to create a “pure” human race using a supposed descendant of Adolf. Today, where anyone who doesn’t agree with anyone else is labeled as a “Nazi” or the next “Hitler,” placing him on a pedestal as the ultimate evil yet again is, well, tedious. Hitler wasn’t the first to start this kind of thing or try to rule the world, and he wasn’t even the most successful. Yet, Christie uses him, because he’s an easily identifiable evil, or was, to most people in 1970.

I saw this revolution stuff, too, in my college years. I graduated in 2000 and I can tell you my classmates were as much in love with Mao and Che Guevara as students probably are today. No eyes were batted at these people being violent mass murderers; it was enough they were not American, or against America, or against being just boring vanilla or something. That was the thing, then, and probably still is today. The young are taught that being peaceful and having a happy family, that these things are all lies of some kind because of course some families and some people are unhappy, so therefore it’s wrong for anyone else to be happy or normal or something. We see this in the LGBTQ movement, where the normal romantic loves between a man and woman are pushed aside in pursuit of being unique or troubled in some way. Why is youth so tempted by this stuff? It’s first of all a desire to fit in with one’s peers, the exact opposite of what’s professed, and also the wanting to do something special. And it is a desire for a world with no bad outcomes, no bad choices, and no bad consequences. (But it’s a lie, and as a result so many of these young people commit suicide because they know it’s a lie and they’re just waiting for someone to chastise them with the truth and no one does. It’s like seeing a brother hit his sister and the child knows he’s doing wrong, but the parents always say it’s good, what he’s doing is good. Nothing wrong, no wrong choices, and after awhile the child can’t take it anymore because he knows it’s wrong what he’s doing. It’s written on his heart. It’s written on all of our hearts.)

The trouble with the “heaven on earth” idea is that we are all humans who have only lived on earth. We don’t know what heaven is, not really, and if we are marching to another’s drum, we are trying to implement their version of a heaven, not actually Heaven. Human nature also can’t be controlled completely by other humans, and if it can, the loss of freedom would be great. We’ll stab you in the back as much as we’ll love you, and so utopian movements fail as people start to grab power only for themselves or lose faith in the movement.

Near the end of the story, Christie brings up this Benvo project or benevolence project, basically a scientific experiment to make people stop being violent and desire only other people’s good. Normal benevolence is a great thing, this would be a nightmare. By this point in the story, I honestly wasn’t sure if these people were the good guys or the bad guys at this point. They wanted to stop the violent movements by drugging people into being good, no, not being good, making them have no desires but to please others. Ella Enchanted, anyone? It would be the worst kind of slavery! Basically, the conclusion is that people who want to rule the world for whatever reason are ultimately not be trusted. They come to see themselves as gods and other people as ants. Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, they think of themselves all as great Napoleons, too smart to be chained by any laws whatsoever. And they will eagerly commit murder or lobotomies for the sake of their future “heaven on earth.”

What does that have to do with Q? Well, we want to believe the Q team is the good guys, and I do hope they are, but the reality is that they may be, too, envisioning a world that can only succeed with careful control over everyone and everything. If the “swamp” is drained, if all corruption stamped out, and all the criminals brought to justice, even then, even then, new people will be waiting at the gates to seize power. The peace and prosperity will only be until the corruption and revolutions start again. Q says to “trust the plan” and says the followers are watching things unfold almost like a movie. It’s mostly good and it’s mostly exciting, but the truth is that it’s not a movie, it’s real life. And the truth is, all the new information people have unearthed can be just as useless as it can be useful. The strides made are largely political moves that bore the young to tears. Talk about FISA and people’s eyes glaze over (as one example).

This is not to dampen the efforts of Q, Trump, or MAGA, but this all is about exchanging the old guard of power into a new guard, hopefully better than the last, but still never quite the “power for the people” that’s always promised. We can have anarchy or we can have rulers, and anarchy only leads to stricter rulers. Peace, prosperity, freedom. These are the goals, and can only be reached for the average person by having a good strong man in power, and good, strong men are rare, rarer still if they don’t get corrupted by being in power.

The real good in the world is found in everyday life, in normalcy, in living in the truth. And so Christie’s book ends with the promise of a wedding, the man has gotten his girl, their naughty little bridesmaid says her prayers and seems back on the straight and narrow, and the world is whole again, for a time. As a Christian I know without God, we are nothing, that a world without Him would be hell. Still, it’s tempting to look to other people, like Trump, as someone who can save us from ourselves, but he’s not a savior, he’s breaking the media’s hold on us, and that’s no small thing. He’s showing us how hollow the promises of our congressmen are, and that’s no small thing. He’s showing us that good has to be fought for, and that’s a big thing, perhaps the biggest thing. We can’t have utopia, but we may be able to live in peace for a time, and this may mean embracing nationalism and discarding the globalism that is only putting the poorest of us in stricter chains.

The world is bad enough already, Q says, but there are those rich and powerful who are only fostering more hurt, manufacturing more war, and they should be relieved of their power for the sake of everyone. The Clinton’s should be in jail, shouldn’t they? It’s best to think of things in those terms, I think: Crimes and punishments for them. It does no good to dream on about utopias, Libertarian or otherwise. There may be no mass arrests or martial law, but why would we want either, really? It’s enough if there’s one significant arrest and we avoid martial law and the good strong man becoming the bad strong man. It’s good enough if we avoid being experimented on and made to love being good or love the state, like in 1984. Even God doesn’t force us to be good, even God doesn’t force us to believe in Him.

Sigh. One tries to be an insightful writer, telling truths no one else seems to get or something, but it’s all like a lecture and tedious and I got sort of bored writing it all out, just as I got bored with whatever dear Agatha was trying to say in her story. The truly profound is elusive. Politics are politics. Power is power. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Passenger to Frankfurt like Qanon, is only remarkable because today we have been so very, very steeped in lies. In a climate where the truth is mostly apparent, i.e. common sense, these kinds of stories and devices wouldn’t be needed. But humans tend to lie and be illogical, so we’ll see these stories pop up time and again to remind us we are being manipulated. We are being manipulated, but aside from knowing the truth, there’s not much the average person can do. That’s the lesson. At most one can share the truth with other people. As a Christian, this makes sense to me, for Christianity is much the same: Here is the way things are. Here is Jesus, the way to salvation. You can believe in Him or not. That’s about it. But that’s everything! Because believing in Jesus gives us the confidence to go out and do good and have that power of positive thinking that Trump was raised on. So in Christ’s name, we can have the grand plans, the grand stories, and also the everyday ones. We can have all the cake and eat it too, but that Heaven will not be on this broken earth.

Ok, there I go again. One tries to say something wise and it just ends up sounding like a lecture. Anyway, Passenger to Frankfurt strangely connects with the Q movement, if only in the sense that it tries to pull back the curtain, so show the people pulling the strings. Things are more interconnected than we’d like to believe. People have a staggering amount of power and wealth and hide it well. These are things to be aware of. Conspiracy theories should be researched, not scoffed at. Great wrongs are often righted in the world behind the scenes, sometimes with spies and crazy plans and people who will forever have to be anonymous. They are not important, but what they are doing is.

At the Voting Booth

Jul26

On Election Day, Tony stood in line at his local community center. He sipped at a hot coffee from the diner down the street and pulled up the hood on his sweatshirt to keep warm in the chilly morning. If he had been fully awake, he would have noticed something a bit odd about the people standing in line with him and even about the community center.

Tony had never actually been to the community center before. It was located just where he had always thought the Super Clean car wash was. Now, he looked up and down the street and scratched his head. Maybe the car wash was on the next parallel street? It was too early to think. He took a big gulp of coffee and nearly choked on it when he thought he saw a thick blue tail sticking out underneath the trench coat of the man in front of him. The man turned around.

“You ok, buddy?”

Tony blinked. The man was just an ordinary man, no tail, to blue skin of any kind. “Yeah, the coffee just went down the wrong way.” He shook his head. It was too early to be up. He must still be half in dreamland, for the community center seemed to be shimmering in front of his eyes, and just behind the shimmer sat the car wash.

It took about a twenty-minute wait in line before Tony entered the building. He had brought his driver’s license and voter’s card as required. The large woman at the registration desk took a long time finding his name.

“Not one of our usuals,” She said, nodded at his ID and voter’s card. Her hair was so curly and shiny that it looked very much like copper wire––it was copper wire! Again, Tony blinked and saw that she really had soft blond curls. “You’re not on the list, but here’s your ballot. Vote wisely.” She cheerfully handed him a long roll of paper and nodded towards the curtained booths behind her.

“Um…” Tony knew something wasn’t right. “I’m not the list?”

“It’s okay, honey, we can’t keep track of everyone because everyone doesn’t want to be tracked. You see?”

“Not really.” Tony threw his empty coffee cup into a trash can and headed for a booth with his roll of paper. He didn’t remember voting ballots ever being this long. A tall man in a three-piece suit dramatically flung one of the velvet curtains aside. Tony entered the booth and the man flung the curtain back into place. The booth was rather spacious and even had a roof, an actual desk, lamp and velvet-cushioned chair. He sat down and gingerly picked up the fine gold pen that sat on one side of the cherry wood desk. “Here goes.”

He unrolled the long ballot and found it to be made of an odd shiny substance. Tony uncapped the pen and read the first amendment: Amd. 354, 452: The planet NeBon-Bon should be reserved for those with sweet teeth only.

“Huh?” He moved on to the second one: Amd. 789,437: Super power wars shall only be allowed on the third day of the second month of the lunar year on the eighth ring of Saturn. “But Saturn only has seven rings…” The next twelve amendments listed were much in the same vein and total incomprehensible to him. The listing of candidates wasn’t much better. There was a zombie running against a pit bull, a clown running against a ghost and someone named Zooko, a fairy pitted against a warlock, and an alien running for mayor against an android. Tony suddenly had the feeling that he had stepped into a different universe just to vote for his district representative. He was sadly unable to leave the booth until he filled out the entire ballot, which was over six feet long.

Copyright Pixie Beldona, 2010