(Phaysis)

1. The Internet is the worst place to go if you have something to say.
2. Activity is not motion, but motion is an activity.
3. Don’t bring signs to a battle of words. They are inflexible and can be used against you.
4. If you’re fighting on two fronts, you’ll have to watch your own back.
5. Keep off the grass, especially when requested. When asked twice, doubly so.
6. Just because you’re seated does not mean you are immobile.
7. Educate yourself about the enemy, but resist the urge to use that knowledge to become the enemy once he is vanquished.

I’ve been thinking. If the federal government were to ever legalize marijuana, that would open the market for legal farming. It would be another cash crop farmers could consider to sustain their livelihood. Moral and legal entanglements aside, there’s a major caveat to this.

Once it’s legal and proven profitable on the market, and once boards of directors can convince their shareholders that it’s a good crop to get into, Monsanto, Cargill, and ADM will effectively take over and sue into contractual submission any farmer who doesn’t grow their patented genetically-modified seeds, just as they currently do with soy, corn, cotton, and wheat. Any independent farmer running a grow-op with heritage seeds will have a planeload of relentless, deeply-pocketed lawyers at their door to coerce them into destroying their crops because the company’s GMO seeds are somehow mysteriously growing on their land without permission.

It’s inevitable. You know this to be true. Where there is money to be made, there will be multinationals there to consume it, no matter who suffers.

Next you know, the nation is smoking Roundup-Ready weed stock, but everybody will be too stoned to care.

People are talking about this Occupy Wall Street thing. How it’s the first true grass-roots, decentralized, Internet-based movement of the people. Is it? I don’t know. It’s too big to see all the component parts and to locate the strings being pulled. Follow the money, I say.

Thing is, not even people who are in the movement know what the movement stands for. There’s been no central voice, no unifying rally cry other than to bring down the greed and redistribute the big money to everybody. Sure, that sounds great. The 1% at the top are taking and conniving and twisting their ways into higher profits. Bigger is better, right? Isn’t that the American way?

I don’t know how I feel about this whole thing. On the one idealist hand, I’d like to see a little more equality between the classes and a redistribution of power, and maybe even some accountability for those at the top. But my realist hand reminds me that I work for a Fortune 500 company whose profits are affected greatly by the rumblings on the market. What is a corporation? It’s a body of people in the business of making money, feeding their own greed to accumulate more than they need for survival. Without greed, there’s little impetus to exceed our horizons.

Things in this country suck; I’ll admit that. It’s tough to make a living without making serious sacrifices on quality of life. But imagine how bad it would be if Occupy Wall Street actually manages to bring down the top 1%.

O’Brien: “Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

— George Orwell, “1984″

Since I’ve made the conscious choice to buck my biological imperative and not father any offspring, then obviously my purpose on this earth is to help others spawn and raise their own. I say to hell with that. If I’m this misanthropic against adults, what the hell do I care for their children? Do you really think I’m going to play the role of the matchmaker, bellhop, busboy, and babysitter? Hell no.

If anything, my role should be to make it harder for you to raise your fat little ticks. To let them do all the sucking they want on you and you alone. To add disruptions to your spawning. To sweep the eggs out of the riverbed. To lead the tadpoles astray into predator territory. Only the strongest will survive, right?

With the exception of a few of you parents (friends whom I know to be highly capable of the job), the rest of you get none of my sympathy or support.

Anybody else agree?