Frankly, one of our political parties is insane, and we all know which one it is. They have descended from the realm of reasonableness that was the mark of conservatism. They dream of anarchy, of ending government.

— Bruce Bartlett

My fellow Americans –

I’ll tell you who’s insane: anyone who’s not dreaming of anarchy at this moment in history is insane. People forget that this great nation was founded by anarchists, born out of an armed revolution against a corrupt government.

As I said at the time, “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

I assure you, though, that regrettably neither current political party dreams of anarchy. They both dream of exactly the same things: self-aggrandizement and rewarding their most powerful supporters with political spoils.

The well-known liberal cartoonist Ted Rall wrote a book a couple of years ago advocating a new American revolution. Unfortunately, while popular uprisings do continue to occur around the world, I am not optimistic that it will ever happen again in America.

The great majority of our citizens now are far more informed about fantasy football and reality TV than they are about current events. They understand politics at only the most simple-minded level: Team Red vs. Team Blue.

I’m Team Blue! Let’s go, Blue! BOOOOO, Team Red! Or vice versa.

Notice, for example, that all of the things that Team Blue hated so much about the George W. Bush administration are okay now that they’re being carried out by President Obama.

Obama didn’t stop the wars or the torture or the spying. He’s just as cozy with Wall Street. Gitmo is still open for “prolonged detention.” Moreover, he’s killing foreign civilians, and sometimes American citizens, with drone strikes, and he’s eliminating whatever civil liberties you think you have left.

Torture and war and economic collapse don’t matter as long as they’re being supervised by my team! Go Blue! We’ll all be in a gulag in 10 years. Go Blue!

Some despotic regimes around the world rely on starvation and threats of violence to keep the people in a state of submissive compliance. Here in America, the same collective stupor is effected via mindless entertainments and gadgetry.

I should raise myself out of depression, paralysis and failure and resist this massive government/corporate dystopia — but I might miss my TV programs.

In 1776, we decided that being Americans meant being free men and women, not serfs and lackeys. We mutually pledged to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor to throw off the abuses and usurpations of the Government, and to secure the blessings of Liberty.

How soon they forget.

I bid you God speed,

Thomas Jefferson, anarchist

Take that, liberal heathen! She’s not “supposed” to pray in a school but she did it anyway! And that’s why she’s alive today!

It would be useful to know for the purpose of assessing the value of prayer as a tornado survival tactic, how many of the 24 people who didn’t survive the Oklahoma tornado were praying at the moment of their death.

Of the 10 children who were killed, were any of them praying? Maybe God said to himself, “Okay, change of plans. I was going to hit Rhonda Crosswhite with this tornado, but since she’s praying out loud in a school, I’ll redirect it into those 10 kids.”

Country music legend George Jones dies at 81

— CNN.com

From Salon, before the bombers were identified, captured and/or killed:

Shame on everyone who assumed that the bombers were Muslims from a foreign land! Wait — what? They were Muslims from a foreign land? OK, never mind.

Calling out “far-right extremists” for “demonizing bogeymen” is either hilariously ironic or depressingly symptomatic of American decline. Since Salon is not known for its satire, I have to go with the latter.

Satan

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan -- PE]

Pastor Rick Warren’s son, Matthew, commits suicide, church says

— NBCNews.com

I hope this won’t affect sales of The Purpose Driven Life.

The church is calling for prayers. They prayed for the kid — well, young man (he was 27) — when he was alive, he kills himself and now they’re calling for more prayers?! Wasn’t it Einstein who said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results?

This is great PR for me, of course. My cell is blowing up . . . so many people trying to get in touch with me this weekend.

Dear Satan — Please look after my children. I don’t want them to end up like Rick Warren’s kid.

There are many troubled people on Earth looking for answers. And there are some people claiming to have the answers and offering to sell them to you.

One of my favorite Peanuts cartoons goes something like this:

LUCY (kneeling and looking at the ground): Look at those stupid bugs … They don’t have the slightest idea as to what is going on in this world.

CHARLIE BROWN: What is going on in this world?

LUCY: I don’t have the slightest idea.

I don’t have the slightest idea either and I’m Satan, for crying out loud. (I miss Charlie Schulz, by the way. He’s in heaven now.)

If you want a key takeaway from the Matthew Warren/Rick Warren story, here it is: Nobody has a clue.

Nobody has a clue.

See you in Hell . . .

The Death of Socrates

When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing . . . And if you do this, I and my sons will have received justice at your hands.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

— Apology

Jon Provost and Lassie

A new study from the American Council on Education shows that the percentages of black, Asian and Hispanic provosts have declined over the past five years.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this story under the headline “Falling Diversity of Provosts Signals Challenge for Presidential Pipeline, Study Finds.”

FALLING DIVERSITY! LOOK OUT BELOW!

Ha ha . . . but seriously, who even knows what a provost is? I don’t. I’ve vaguely heard of it as an academic job title but that’s about it.

I know that Jon Provost played little Timmy on the Lassie TV series. I know that Marie Prevost was a one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty and leading lady in the 1920s whose screen glory had faded by the time she died of acute alcoholism in a small Hollywood apartment at the age of 38.

By the way, I notice that Asian students are continuing to excel, even in the absence of Asian provosts. Go figure.

I’m sad. As a lifelong Laker fan, I kind of feel like I knew the guy. He bought the Lakers in 1979, which means he was younger than I am today, and now he’s dead at the age of 80. I feel old.

Dr. Buss was a USC alum. Fight on.

R.I.P. Jerry Buss

We are all receding — waving or beckoning or just kissing our fingertips, we are all fading, shrinking, paling. Life is all losing, we are all losing, losing mother, father, youth, hair, looks, teeth, friends, lovers, shape, reason, life. We are losing, losing, losing. Take life away. It’s too hard, too difficult. We aren’t any good at it. Try us out on something else. But shelve life. Take life off the stands. It’s too fucking difficult and we aren’t any good at it.

— Martin Amis, Money

That reminds me — it’s probably about time to schedule an eye exam because I can’t goddamn see any more . . .

An alleged fight between two female blackjack dealers at the Bellagio hotel-casino in Las Vegas sent one of the women to the hospital and the other to jail.

It was the second violent incident inside a Las Vegas Strip casino in recent days. Last week, an Illinois man shot and killed his ex-girlfriend and then himself in the lobby of the Excalibur resort. The woman was an employee of the resort.

— Report: Female Las Vegas blackjack dealer stabs another – NBCNews.com

Hasn’t NBC News heard of the “What happens in Vegas . . .” code?

It used to puzzle me how parents could stand to live at a distance from their adult children. Now I think it’s because it’s a bit embarrassing to have your kids see how absurdly vacant your life has become now that your parenting days are over.

A lot of species, once they get too old to have and raise offspring, they just die. They don’t hang around forever and make everyone uncomfortable.

Maybe a little distance isn’t such a bad thing.

Within a week or so, we’ve had Jovan Belcher, the mall shooting in Oregon and 26 people killed at a school in Connecticut. I’m hearing that maybe we should do something about guns.

But we’ve always had guns. Since the country was founded July 4, 1776, Americans have had guns, and for most of that time, we’ve managed to live with each other without a mass murder a week.

It can’t be just the guns.

One of the most appalling things to me about modern American society is the way increasingly graphic violence is peddled as entertainment. Turn on the TV: mass murder is entertainment. Grotesque, violent death is “great television.”

Serial killers in movies are the heroes. They can’t be killed off because they’ve got to come back and kill more people in the next sequel.

I know John Wayne used to kill people in movies, but when the Duke shot people, they just grabbed their gut and toppled over. It couldn’t possibly have been more fake. Now when someone gets shot in a movie, they have to be shot in the head. Shooting someone in the head is horrific. And there has to be blood spatter on walls or bystanders or both. And this is entertainment.

It diminishes humanity. It’s bad karma to pretend to kill and be killed for public amusement. It’s bad karma to trifle with death.

zu-Kung asked about government. The Master said, sufficient food, sufficient weapons, and the confidence of the common people. Tzu-Kung said, Suppose you had no choice but to dispense with one of these three, which would you forgo? The Master said, Weapons. Tzu-Kung said, Suppose you were forced to dispense with one of the two that were left, which would you forgo? The Master said, Food. For from of old death has been the lot of all men; but a people that no longer trusts its rulers is lost indeed.

— The Analects of Confucius

Confucius (Photo credit: JayPLee)

Master Tsêng said, The true Knight of the Way must perforce be both broad-shouldered and stout of heart; his burden is heavy and he has far to go. For Goodness is the burden he has taken upon himself; and must we not grant that it is a heavy one to bear? Only with death does his journey end; then must we not grant that he has far to go?

— The Analects of Confucius

EUREKA, Calif. (AP) — A couple died and their 16-year-old son went missing after being swept into sea in Northern California while trying to save their dog, authorities said Sunday.

The family was at Big Lagoon, a beach north of Eureka, Saturday afternoon when the dog chased after a thrown stick and got pulled into the ocean by eight to ten foot waves, said Dana Jones, a state Parks and Recreation district superintendent.

— Couple swept to sea in effort to save son, dog – Yahoo! News

Hi, everybody! It’s me, Lightning!

Folks: Don’t throw sticks into 10-foot waves. I’m not a stick-chasing kind of dog myself, but some dogs, like retrievers, are just born to fetch things. They can’t help it.

So it’s up to you, the owner, not to throw something where it’s not safe for the dog to be.

Another thing: the dog in this case actually made it out of the ocean by himself!

Dogs know how to swim — just keep your head up and paddle! Humans sometimes will panic or give up but a dog will keep trying and not give up.

— Lightning

Jack Gilbert was an American poet. He died last week. There’s a poem of his that I like called “Failing and Flying.”

We’re watching SportsCenter when a picture of Jerry Kill, coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers football team, comes on the screen, accompanied by the unfortunate news that Kill suffered a seizure following the team’s 21-13 loss to Northwestern.

“He’s still alive?” my son asks. “He didn’t die?”

“He had a seizure,” I say.

“So he’s still alive, right?”

“Yeah.”

“In that case, I’m going to go ahead and say that he looks like a gopher.”

Edward Archbold was, according to those who met him on Friday night, the life of the party – a bit of a showoff who was up for anything, even a giant cockroach-eating contest.

He won. And then, tragically, he died.

— Florida man dies after winning cockroach-eating contest – U.S. News

Not every death is a tragedy. (We pause here for a moment to give Darwin a chance to spike the football.)

Whenever I hear someone described as “a bit of a showoff who’s up for anything,” I find myself wondering how soon they can die in some bizarre attempt to attract attention.

Given what we know about the deceased, how surprised are you — on a scale of zero to 10 — that a shirtless mug shot was available for use in his obituary?

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord . . .

Medical office visits are intimations of mortality . . .

I had an appointment this morning to have blood drawn. Of the patients who went ahead of me, none of them left the office without elaborately thanking the receptionist.

“Thank you,” they all said with immense politeness.

Everyone is superstitious in the face of death. I’m a good person. I’m going to show what a good person I am by graciously thanking a humble receptionist and maybe they won’t find anything bad in my blood test and maybe I won’t die . . .