India-Israel Worker Deal Looks like Indentured Servitude / Michelle Buckley & Paula Chakravartty

SuperTruth® has brought low the mighty human race. SuperTruth® has turned reality into insanity. SuperTruth® has turned insanity into anxiety, so at least the insane are motivated to go to work. At least anxiety forces us to find a way to function, to search for that which will relieve our anxiety. Life is a disease, and there’s only one cure. But since most of us fear death, we’ll have to settle for… SuperTruth®.

When skies hang pendulous leaden clouds of unnatural hue; seas skip like rams and leap and bow like fire-worshiping devils; the atmosphere groans fat and snappish with negative ions, the barometer uncoils, fright wigs are on edge, and pancake white refuses to be applied evenly to faces beaded with flop-condensation; and all the world’s stage feels burdened by a furrowed lowbrow glower redolent with the sense that too much time has been borrowed, the usurious interest is overdue and the gas gauge reads that your luck has run out; that is when the Lost Dauphine is sighted, bearing its unhappy driver and four dozen eternal passengers, cursed to ride the storm clouds galloping heavy over the bigtop… forever.

It had been a bad year for clowns. Chuckles, dressed as Peter Peanut, had been fatally shelled by an angry elephant who’d had enough of human shenanigans. Pennywise had his heart pulled out by the Losers Club. Octavio the Clown was killed by Frank Lopez’s hitmen in an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Tony Montana. Violator the Clown’s head was cut off by Spawn. Krusty was eaten by Zombie Sideshow Mel. A posse of Penn State students rampaged with the intent to lynch a thousand clowns, but only got the unfortunate Bippo. But the worst clownaclysm of all was the notorious disaster of the Dauphine.

In September of 1989, tragedy struck the non-clown community: 31-year-old Leslie Pulhar, a waitress from Royal Oak, Michigan, was driving across the Mackinac Bridge to visit her boyfriend in the Upper Peninsula. The bridge runs high above the Straits of Mackinac, connecting the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with the Lower. To this day no one knows why the two are part of the same state. Perhaps the thinking was that, as two peninsulas, they had so much in common they simply belonged together. Whatever the reason, Pulhar died when her Yugo was blown off the bridge by a 48-mile-an-hour gust of wind that sent it plummeting 160 feet... read more

The loudest, most obnoxious mass of Christians had come to the general agreement that, the more Jesus loved you, the wealthier and more powerful He would make you in this world. He did this to balance out all the Muslims, Confucians, and other heathens Satan in His nastiness rendered wealthy and powerful. The only explanation for the majority of wealthy, powerful people in the world not being Christian was that, even though Jesus could easily win against the Devil, sometimes He let the Devil win, by mistake or on purpose, just to keep everyone guessing. If the overall picture were simple to interpret, faith wouldn’t be the test it was known it to be. And so, even under the simplistic, dogmatic doctrines of Dominionist Evangelical Christianity, there was room for confused outcomes.

And thank God for that!

Tom Brokaw was a simple, millionaire news-whisperer and fly-fisherman who called the generation that profited most from the FDR public works program—in other words an entire generation of welfare leeches—the “Greatest Generation.” Once in late September of the year 2022 (by the old TV Guide calendar), he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. In it he bragged about his friendship with – no, not post-modern Homer, David Letterman – Yvon Chouinard, son of a Froggy Canook mechanic who reluctantly became an outdoor apparel tycoon.

Brokaw, in an attempt to show how low he was slumming it by hanging out with a fellow millionaire, kept calling the guy a “dirtbag,” which was apparently some slang term rock-climbing skiers liked to call each other, and had not much to do with bags of dirt at all. He also referred to Chouinard’s early life as a leisure sportsman rock climber and skier as “hardscrabble,” a term usually used to describe the lives of poor farmers. Rocks are indeed hard, and Chouinard probably found Scrabble a challenging game as a child, but that did not qualify his life as “hardscrabble.” It’s no surprise that Tom Brokaw, who coined the incorrect moniker “Greatest Generation,” should describe the life of an avid outdoorsman who became an apparel capitalist as “hardscrabble.” Tom Brokaw didn’t really know what words meant. A survey of his coverage of US foreign policy during his years as propaganda parrot confirms this.

Brokaw wrote his piece, entitled... read more