Abramoff’s appearance on the Colbert Report highlights the intrinsic satire of Abramoff’s career…

What I DO still see a lot of though is opinionating. And personal irresponsibility. And confusion. Last fall a former Ann Arborite – writing for the National Review – said that  “an Occupy Ann Arbor is like a special ballet company, set aside for thin people.” Nothing could really be farther from the truth; this town is so conservative that the real problem has been getting enough people present to actually occupy anything in a noticeable fashion. And when they do get together in any notable numbers – amongst the self-identified Occupy groups in the area, there is a strange mix of factionalism and solidarity – there will often be a strange result. They will suddenly realize once again that they agree on a bunch of things, but then get mired in debate about what to do and how to do it. This perplexed me for months, and then I finally came to understand a few things.

Before I go on, I have to clarify that I think the movement in general has a long tail, and that I’ve met some of the most amazing people I’ll probably ever meet in my life by participating. People I feel comfortable saying that I love. And as someone who has been expressing my frustration about things like banksterism, agency capture, and fiat currency since 2008, I am thankful to have discovered that I am not alone. Provided occupiers can remember to stay focused on paradigm-shifting innovation, the movement could truly change the world. Some really amazing hearts, minds and souls are driving things. But having said that, I can confidently say that I’ve also seen some of the worst of human character in action too.

Although I have participated in activism in the form of NGO’s and charitable work before, it had never occurred to me that a “career” activist may possess certain other traits to accompany their sense of social justice, altruism, or sacrifice. The most frustrating to me is also one of the most subtle. There’s a good chance that if one has the mindset to decide that a lot of things are wrong with the world, they will carry this worldview into everything they do, never being happy with the process or results of the groups they work with, and always leaving meetings with a chip on their shoulder. And especially in the groups in this town, that attitude will rarely get challenged for what it is. Why? Because as I often joke, it’s ironic that the elephant is the mascot of the GOP, because intellectual liberals often have the biggest elephants in the room, thanks to their affected sense of respect, and paralyzing political correctness. Other traits that are natural components of a career activist’s “save the world” mentality bear a strange resemblance to religious fundamentalism, i.e.: self-righteousness, paranoia, intellectual arrogance, hypersensitivity, hero complexes, and the tendency to be a victim of what I call the “Look, a bunny! Syndrome”, i.e., getting distracted by every tiny wrong in the world and trying to fix them, and therefore never getting anything done.

And the larger movement? It is often confusing even to participants. Although it’s amazing that a leaderless movement with no official platform has exploded globally to include millions of people, this same lack of structure is a setup for some ironic outcomes, and a perplexing public image. Although major media sources like the Wall Street Journal recently reported  that the Occupy Movement is planning a July 4 “caucus”, Occupy Wall Street’s PR Working Group immediately made emphatic statements  that OWS doesn’t endorse the event, and essentially said that the 99 percent Declaration Working Group was not a legitimate “Occupy” group. The irony here is glaring; what they’re essentially saying is that “there is no organization. Unless our organization says so“. Which is an especially ironic statement, in light of the fact that OWS applied for a trademark  for the name last fall. It’s evident that OWS can’t stop people from starting pretty much anything they like, and slapping the “Occupy” label on it, including an Occupy SuperPAC.

The Atlantic asked in a recent piece What if Occupy Created a Movement so Big it Couldn’t Control it?  Well, I think “they” already did. The word “occupy” is so easily adapted to different contexts that it’s impossible to control its propagation. This was partly calculated, and partly accident. Although Adbusters is often credited with “creating” the movement, their call to “Occupy Wall Street” was just one of many such calls to action, many of which have had zero impact. Remember the Carnivalesque Rebellion? I didn’t think so. Buy Nothing Day? Maybe, but that never seemed to have an impact on retail sales. Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn may have hit the mark with the branding this time, but he was well aware of the Arab Spring and the pre-OWS Bloombergville, and merely managed to “nail the brand” of something that was about to explode anyway. And will continue exploding.

Because you know what? The world IS kind of screwed up, and most of the problems are caused by a centuries-old economic paradigm that – although it keeps a precious few powerful and self-satisfied – is doomed. Their wealth and power relies entirely on a social contract with the rest of us, and they know it. And they have broken that contract. And regardless of how you break down the percentages, there are a LOT more of “us” than “them”.

Think the “Occupy Movement” is a joke? We’ll see you in June! Unless US gas prices hit five bucks even sooner than expected. Those who have hesitated to get seriously involved so far are probably sensible; life in the states is actually pretty easy, frankly. But things might feel a little different if those who are already just “tightening up” suddenly find they can’t keep up with their cable and mobile bills AND eat.

TV and pizza. It’s the new Bread & Circuses!

Charmageddon

Are you trapped in a dismal relationship, dreading Valentine’s Day even more than usual this year? Well put your mind at ease, because this is your time. Why? In case you forgot, we’re all going to die in some kind of end-of-the world scenario this year, like maybe Chicken Shawarmageddon. What better time to end a relationship than The End of Days? We’ve served up plenty of strange Valentine’s Day gift ideas  before, like Last Minute Valentine Gifts For Romance Impaired Misogynists, and Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas To Win Back Your Ex-Girlfriend. But this year, why worry about your existing ex, when you can make a new one? And if you want to make sure someone gets out of your life forever, what better day than Valentine’s Day? There’s no need to boil someone’s bunny, like in Fatal Attraction, or put a horse head on their bed, as in the famous kiss-off in The Godfather. Besides, in some cultures, the latter was historically considered an expression of love. No, giving someone the pink slip on Valentine’s Day will leave no doubt in their mind about whether it’s just a passing quarrel, and can be accomplished with simple and inexpensive gifts that say it all. So if you’re simply looking to dump someone, or, worse yet, if you’ve settled for an awkward half-baked solution that has left you in a position where the three words you dread hearing most as you make passionate love with the person that truly sets your heart on fire are “Honey, I’m home”, maybe it’s time to make a change. We’re here to help with the perfect gifts to break someone’s heart, instead of melting it.

	One quick, easy and FREE method of beginning the end of things is the by-now-cliched “change your Facebook relationship status” trick. Just be careful. This can get you killed.
	Nothing says “goodbye” like a set of luggage. Except when you add “there’s the door, don’t let it hit your ass on the way out”. The Samsonite 5 Piece Nested Luggage Set is not only affordable, it’ll make him look cheap as he wanders from cheap hotel to cheap hotel, pondering where he went wrong.
	Give them a copy of Mars and Venus Starting Over: A Practical Guide for Finding Love Again After a Painful Breakup, Divorce, or the Loss of a Loved One, right after you re-key all the locks on the house, drain the bank accounts, and hire a lawyer. The existence of this book begs the question though: If John Gray is so good at saving relationships, why did he need to write a breakup book?
	If you’re a woman, the solution may be simpler than you think. First, stop faking orgasms. That’ll mess him up. And once you’ve got him off-balance, give him the creepy and clinical looking Male Extender Penis Enlargement Device. Now only $239.98!
	Or save a lot of money and deliver a more lethal blow with the Size Matters Beginner Pump for only $11.91.
	If you’re a man, you may or may not have figured out by now that the answer to the question “do I need to lose a little weight?” is nothing other than “No, don’t be silly”. In any case, there’s no mistaking the message sent by a common bathroom scale. Especially if you call from the tarmac to tell her it’s gift-wrapped and sitting on the kitchen counter, after boarding your one-way flight to Thailand.
	Whether you plan to take action or not, the sadly under-acknowledged genius of Cynthia Heimel turns the tragedy of romance into side-splitting comedy in her books Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Goodbye!, When Your Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’ll Be Me, and If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?!
	Granny panties. Need we say more? This is of course a gift for yourself, not for your soon-to-be-ex. This tool may be even more effective if you’re a man and start wearing them.
	If you’re a man, you’ve probably already got this covered, and it’s only her blind devotion that has kept her from leaving you already. If you’re a woman, this is an easy and free way to drive him away. Give those pits a rest, and all those other places too. Why is waxing not against the Geneva Convention, anyway?
	Need more ideas? Oh c’mon. There must be fifty ways to leave your lover. Do we have to do all the heavy lifting around here? Okay, one more. Start dressing like Paul Simon.

The “fan video” that introduced me to Rebecca & Fiona

If nothing else, they seem to enjoy their job as much as their fans:

For the record, the trailer doesn’t BEGIN to do the film justice, probably for commercial reasons, it focuses on dialogue and erotica. And although there’s a lot of unerotic “erotica” in the film, it’s hardly the core of the story.

Let’s face it. LOTS of things may have
contributed to this despicable act.

I’m so (ahem) relieved that world leaders have finally taken a stance on that whole peeing on corpses thing. Afghan leader Hamid Karzai’s heart seems to be in the right place; I think most of us would agree with his assessment that peeing on dead people is wrong. And I guess it was pretty big of the Taliban to not take offense over the whole affair, but I imagine that whatever public statements were reported by the press omitted the part at the end where the spokesman muttered “Hell. We do it to YOUR guys ALL THE TIME”. Call me old fashioned, but to me the weirdest part about the global dialogue about the appropriateness of urinating on the dead was the way it was framed in the first place. I mean sure, pissing on someone – whether they’re alive OR dead – is just plain rude. But isn’t it even RUDER to KILL them? So there’s that. But having accepted that you’re going to put a bunch of men in killing suits, and then having trained them for several years to get into a calculated frenzy to kill OTHER guys in killing suits, what do you expect? Imagine you’re one of these soldiers. You’ve just spent months in the desert with a small band of comrades who are the only thing between you and certain death at the hands of ANOTHER small band of comrades – whose biggest ideological difference with you is really just that they want to kill you – and you finally achieve the goal. Which is of course not getting killed, and often involves killing the other guy in terrifying night time conflicts where half the time you’re more worried about not getting your family jewels blown off by an IED, or not killing your pals in the dark by accident than anything else. Face it. A person is pretty pent up and stressed out at this point, and has been driven beyond any sense of rational human behavior. What are they supposed to do? Re-enact some cheesy scene from an old war movie, and hold the guy dying in his arms while he says something quotable for his Wikipedia page? The absurdity of this whole debate about peeing on dead soldiers led to a heated argument with a friend of mine. We were talking about warrior conventions, and he said something about how Klingons – the quintessential expression of the warrior spirit in Star Trek films – would probably find few things more dishonorable than urinating on their dead comrades. I pointed out that there were numerous incidents in the Star Trek sagas that specifically highlighted the Klingon’s lack of concern for what was done with their lifeless bodies. But then my friend asked “In any of these instances, was someone trying to PEE ON THEM?” I had to concede on that one. If you know a Trekkie who can answer that question with any authority, drop us a line. But in the meantime, I have an idea that will help avoid the sticky question of whether or not it’s appropriate to pee on someone after you kill them. How about we don’t kill each other in the first place. And heck, for good measure, let’s also just generally agree to not pee on each other either. Unless of course it’s someone like Kim Jong Il, who – now that his body will be lying in state for ETERNITY – stands a pretty good statistical chance of getting peed on. Which reminds me for some reason of the video below

But first, a word from Double Doodie Toilet Bags

“…back and forth…forever…”

Take Back Our Government

Get lobby money and corporate influence out of the political process.

Repeal corporate personhood. Or start executing corporations for their crimes.

End “agency capture” and the revolving door practices of DC. Stop appointing former executives to regulate the industries that used to employ them.

Don’t just vote in “big” elections, get involved in the full process.

Put People To Work

Transform welfare handout programs into infrastructure-building work programs

Stop shipping jobs overseas to maximize profits. Cut CEO salaries instead.

Revamp The Prison System

America’s prison system is a racially-biased*, multibillion dollar industry that is probably better at training new criminals than anything else. If America wants to continue being the largest consumer of recreational drugs on the planet, maybe those drugs should be legalized and taxed.

Over 2 million Americans are in jail right now, and over 7 million are under correctional supervision. Over 50% are incarcerated for non-violent offenses, and 20% are incarcerated for drug offenses.

America in fact leads the world in incarceration, with Rwanda and Russia trailing in second and third. For comparison, the next western democracy on the list is the United Kingdom, with 1/5 America’s incarceration rate, sitting at 89th on the list worldwide. America has twice the incarceration rate of countries we might think of as oppressive, like Belarus, Ukraine, Iran, and Kazakhstan.

Put some white men in prison. The collateral economic damage caused by a dozen or so of the mostly white, mostly male criminals in the financial services sector easily dwarfs the economic repercussions of crimes committed by a million of the existing inmates in the correctional system, who probably cost us more as prisoners than as active criminals.

Feed Some People

Americans waste about 34 million tons tons of food each year. This is about 14-15 per cent of the food they purchase, amounting to $43 billion worth of discarded, but edible, food. We spend 1 billion dollars a year just to DISPOSE of this waste. Why are people dying of starvation in 2012?

Mind Your Own Business (Unless You’re Helping)

Abroad -

The heroic image of America saving the world in the 1940′s is 70 years old, and coming off a bit contrived these days.

Maybe we could rebuild America’s positive image abroad by only getting involved when asked.

Last time I checked, no-one was asking to be bombed, but plenty of people still wanted an iPad and a Hollywood film.

At Home-

Restore the civil liberties that have been stripped from citizens in the guise of protecting them.

Put an end to the “security theater” that has nearly destroyed the travel industry and makes travel a miserable personal experience.

Let the Patriot Act “sunset” as originally promised, and get AT&T out of our personal communications.

Stop Torturing People

Remember when we WEREN’T the bad guys?

Shoot For The Stars

One of the greatest eras in the history of mankind was largely driven by space exploration.

Magellan, Marco Polo, Columbus, and other brave explorers in history were in it for more than the money.

There’s a strange logical fallacy going on when it’s considered sensible to spend a trillion dollars on killing people, but frivolous to send explorers to learn more about the solar system we live in.

*About 7% of the general population is African American, but African Americans comprise almost half of the total prison population

Shawarmageddon Is Near

One strange side effect of growing up in the era of the DVD and Roland Emmerich films is that your typical end-of-the-world scenarios probably just aren’t gonna cut it. Catastrophic floods? Been there. Alien Invasion? Done that. Earthquakes, floods, and other terrestrial tragedies caused by solar activity? Yup. And Roland Emmerich certainly has no corner on end times scenarios either. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the world has already ended 184 times . There was, of course, a glut of predictions surrounding the year 2000, but except for the “Y2K Bug” – which showed a little creativity – most of those were pretty run-of-the mill asteroid collisions and resurrections of the messiah kind of stuff. So what of interest to us in 2012 could the Mayans possibly have come up with? Nada, that’s what. How could they have possibly envisioned things like the Chicken Shawarmageddon or the The Botoxalypse? I mean, they didn’t even have electricity, never mind Middle Eastern food or the rap music culture necessary to pave the way for the Tupacalypse. No, the whole idea behind the end of the world is that you won’t really be prepared, and the human race probably IS prepared for things like “a whole bunch of water” or frogs falling from the sky. That’s why we’ve assembled a list of twelve alternate endings for 2012. Endjoy.

Carmageddon

This begins on the 405 just outside of LA, cascading in a domino effect that engulfs the globe. This event does not actually bring the end of the world though; a few soccer moms in Volvos survive to rebuild civilization.

Smarmageddon

In this scenario, all cable and satellite channels worldwide begin to broadcast “Fox & Friends” twenty four hours a day, until everyone is driven to a murderous frenzy, decimating most of the global population. This ends up only taking about thirty six hours. Gretchen, Steve, and Brian then lord over 1,000 years of relentless morning smarm, ALL DAY, EVERY DAY.

Chicken Shawarmageddon

This is one of the few end of the world scenarios that is available to go, and usually as a sandwich under five bucks. The word “Shawarma” is derived from a Turkish word that means “to turn”, which is what the world will stop doing in 2012.

Velocirapture

No one is really sure how this one is going to play out. Did the velociraptor go extinct millions of years ago for our sins, only to return and save us from our own self-destruction? Was Jesus really a raptor, who – as it is said in Cretaceous 3:27 – will “save you from Satanasaurus Rex”? Probably only Philosoraptor knows for sure.

Portions of this article are brought to you by Rapture Totale

The original line of skin care products by Christian Dior brought new life to your skin. The 2012 line WILL TAKE IT AWAY. And all the life inside it, too. This scenario may be accelerated by the Botoxalypse (see below).

The Botoxalypse

The bacterium used for Botox mutates, creating an airborne, highly contagious strain that not only removes the ridges from your forehead, but also the ridges from your brain tissue. The world is over-run by masses of bleach blonde, Chanel bag-toting, chardonnay-swilling zombies with expressionless faces.

Ape-pocalypse

If a chimp playing first-person shooters isn’t a sign of the End of Days, I don’t know what is. Next thing you know, they’ll be demanding “Ape Personhood” or something, hahahaha. Oh. Never mind. In any case, I for one welcome our new ape overlords. But I kinda like bananas, so that’s not surprising.

Aporkalypse

Sometimes pigtures speak louder than words.

Arachnapocalypse

Spiders. LOTS AND LOTS of creepy crawly SPIDERS. ‘nough said.

The Jockalypse

Doesn’t it seem like every day, another of your friends starts running or working out fanatically at the gym, maybe switching to a bizarre diet of curdled beans and seaweed? This herd running behavior is merely the beginning. By year’s end, the ENTIRE GLOBAL POPULATION will be running. Nowhere. In teeming hordes. They’re coming your way, as you can see below.

They just had a little bottleneck at the bridge in New York:

Tupacalypse

C’mon. You should’ve known SOMETHING was up with titles like 2Pacalypse Now, Me Against The World, Until The End Of Time, and The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. And he flat out SAID he’d be back to clean things up in Words Of Wisdom.

Econopocalypse

Zombie Banks, Toxic Investments, the Greater Fool losing the Keynesian Beauty Contest , and a Great Vampire Squid Wrapped Around The Face Of Humanity all sound like elements of a George Romero or Wes Craven film, but really, it’s just business as usual in the financial services industry.

Occupocalypse

This scenario will be intense. Or, more accurately, in tents. And probably will be caused by that careless smoker on the right.

Fapture

This only afflicts kittens, and is already occurring, mostly on Reddit/GoneWild .

BUT WAIT!

This isn’t the END of the end of the world, we just didn’t have time or space to cover ALL the possibilities.

Help us out with descriptions or pictures for any of these BONUS catastrophes.

Farmageddon

Charmageddon

Kharmageddon

Crapture

Napture

(Bitch)Slapture

Crockalypse

Dockalypse

Flockalypse

Frockalypse

Glockalypse

Hockalypse

Lockalypse

Mockalypse

Knockalypse

Rockalypse

Sockalypse

Tockalypse

Wocalypse