[Once again Synthesis Blog brings you the rambling wisdom and sagacious meditations of our Synthesis Weekly columnist, Mad Bob Howard. The reclusive and gun-toting Mad Bob can be reached at madbob@madbob.com, but attempts at correspondence will most likely be met with a computer virus and several death threats.]

No Tolerance

Girl-O-Rama! Hurray!: Well, apparently I can’t drink alcohol anymore — at least not in the vast quantities I used to imbibe. For the last couple of months or so, I have been cutting way back on my consumption. That being said, on Saturday night the girlie show was in town and I decided it would be a good night to go ahead and tie one on. That decision turned out to be erroneous. As of this writing it is Tuesday morning, and I am still not 100 percent.
The evening was pure entertainment. 2 Drink and I rolled into Nick’s around 10:30 and caught the last song-and-a-half of the Baghdad Batteries set. Is it just me or are shows starting a helluva lot earlier than they ever used to? The Shankers did what they do so well, and in between the bands and afterward, wonderfully glamorous women performed classic burlesque numbers. There was nothing wrong with the evening that a couple of purposefully placed, brightly sequined tassels spinning in opposite directions couldn’t take care of.
Anyway — after getting my fill of ear and eye candy, I just didn’t want the evening to end and so I followed a small entourage across the street to a lively after party. In retrospect, I would have been better off just going home. I recall talking to some very nice people, but I don’t remember a word of what was said. I recall meeting several very nice dogs as well. I recall drinking at least a couple of beers, but I don’t recall how I got home. It isn’t more than four blocks to my house so I am assuming I walked but you never know.

More after the jump: (more…)

[Once again Synthesis Blog brings you the rambling wisdom and sagacious meditations of our Synthesis Weekly columnist, Mad Bob Howard. The reclusive and gun-toting Mad Bob can be reached at madbob@madbob.com]

Crumbling Faith

“I’m an anarchist – I don’t make rules for other people. I make rules for myself.”
-Utah Phillips

Utah Phillips, legendary songwriter and labor activist, passed away last week at the age of 73. Phillips was born in 1935 and as a young man he served in the army. The gore and human waste he witnessed during combat duty in the Korean War left him angry and deeply disturbed, and when he returned to America, Phillips fell into a life of destitution and alcoholism. He hopped freight trains and moved from state to state and shelter to shelter; then, in his later career as a folk singer and songwriter, Phillips wove the characters he met along the way with the anarchist philosophy he’d adopted to create meaningful music that shone a light on injustice and hinted at a better method of structuring society.

Fingers in the Dyke: All around us we are seeing an erosion of this particular “capitalist” system. Similarly as to how I feel about communism or socialism, I don’t believe there is anything innately wrong with capitalism. All three systems work fine on paper because they are essentially theoretical. The problem is with people and the inevitability of corruption. That’s what we’re seeing today. It’s taken longer than it did to rot out communism, but corruption is devouring our own political and economic system from within.
Consumer capitalism is an economic belief system built primarily on faith. If we all believe things will get better, and keep on spending accordingly, then the system will persist into perpetuity. The economy has been floating on credit cards for the last 20 years. I used to have a problem with the credit cards, and I am telling you it’s the same thing as gambling. You are spending money you don’t have assuming that eventually your personal financial situation will catch up with your spending lifestyle.
But once we lose our faith and decide to hold onto our money instead of sacrificing it on the altar of consumerism, then the system breaks down. This “economic downturn” is ultimately a monster of our own creation — we’ve allowed our faith to crumble.

[More stuff to get the blood boiling after the jump.] (more…)

[The following article, written by Bob Howard for Synthesis Weekly, was originally published in the print version of Synthesis on Monday, May 19th, 2008. He can be reached at bob@madbob.com]

Keep on Drinking
By Bob Howard

“Be it destiny or free will, there are those amongst us who might do the rest of society a favor by staying on the couch, taking bong rips and playing the latest version of Grand Theft Auto.”

A Long History of Stupid: I’ve just started reading a biography of long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and as a result, I’m learning quite a lot about the history of this country and the tradition of our government cracking down on dissent. This latest episode of our history is far from the first time the Bill of Rights has been superseded and suspended in the name of “security.” I have yet to grasp the logic of suspending freedoms to ensure security when I thought that the whole thing we are trying to secure in the first place is freedom; but I digress.
Anyway, here are some interesting factoids I’ve picked up thus far: Remember when in protest of the French dissent against the “War on Terror” our Congress made the brilliant move of re-naming French Fries “Freedom Fries?” Seems like a pretty creative manifestation of nationalistic stupidity, right? Wrong. During World War I, our Congress re-named Sauerkraut “Liberty Cabbage.” Our current stupidity isn’t even original! How do you like that?

Think the threat of terrorism is a new thing? Wrong. Just prior to and then after World War I, the Red Scare developed. Anarchists and Communists were on the rise and there were actually a series of letter bombs and bomb attacks that riddled the nation’s capitol and industrial power figures.
These attacks lead to a complete abridgment of the freedoms granted in the Bill of Rights. Anyone suspected of being a communist, a socialist, or a sympathizer — essentially any Russian factory worker — was rounded up in mass arrests and many were unceremoniously deported so quickly that there wasn’t even time for an appeal.

More heartwarming thoughts after the jump. (more…)