I am so goddamned sick of hearing what Reasonable Men are saying I could puke. For a couple of weeks now the people who should have been tried and imprisoned for war crimes are back retelling their history-distorting lies to all the vacuous dolts who keep putting these beasts in front of television cameras. I don’t know how long it takes to train oneself to sound like a Reasonable Man. But once mastered its possible to carve out a lucrative career in the service of evil.

I truly hate these bastards. They’ve always been around derailing and diffusing anyone who wants to do the right thing.

A long time ago The United States invaded Vietnam. By the time America pulled out of that unholy war millions of Vietnamese had been murdered and countless numbers maimed. There are two big black walls in Washington D.C. with the names of over 58,000 American vets killed in the war etched upon them. All that death and misery because Reasonable Men started the war, and refused to end it, until every last dime could be minted from the blood of those consumed by it.

Yeah -- except for that time back in 2008 when he said atheists were as dangerous as Christian fundamentalists. Remember?

http://www.salon.com/2008/03/13/chris_hedges/

But what the hell  --  Everybody blows their wheels every now and again. I mean he earned a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School so we know he spent a lot of time, and allocated a lot of head space, to the study of gibberish. It was only natural some of that lunacy leaked out. But after The Big Blowout I guess he called the mental health department of Triple A and got back on the road again.

His latest essay, We're Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy,

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/were-post-constitutional-era

is another example of great Chris Hedges writing. But he consistently has a problem with using the correct tenses of verbs. He insists on using the present or future tense when he should be using the past tense.

We’re not losing … we’ve lost.

In 2012, Bonnie Herzog, leading tobacco analyst for Wells Fargo, predicted electronic cigarettes will overtake tobacco cigarettes within ten years. In 2013 she confirmed that projection and said Big Tobacco will take over most of the market.

A competitive free market was not going to determine the winners or losers in the e-cig industry. With this kind of money at stake it was going to take the participation of one of the United States federal executive departments, the FDA, to guarantee the takeover.

On April 24th the FDA’s long awaited deeming regulations regarding electronic cigarettes were released. If these regulations go into effect as written, the number of legal e-cig manufacturers will go from about a thousand … to about five. The twenty thousand legal e-cig products will be cut to … around six. It will cost an e-cig manufacturer close to ten million dollars to file an application with the FDA for each e-cig product. Only Big Tobacco, who has already entered the e-cig market, can afford to jump through those hoops. There will always be e-cigs. Just not the ones I use. Just not the ones I buy from the vendors I like.

In short, the FDA’s 241 pages of provisions give the e-cigarette industry to Big Tobacco.

On my 40th birthday my younger sister gave me a coffee mug with a picture on it of a mouse singing, “Hi Ho … Hi Ho … It’s over the hill I go.” It immediately became my favorite mug I was never going to use. I was going to keep it in pristine condition so I could give it back to her on her 40th birthday. But I almost didn’t get the chance. When I went to retrieve it after eight long years in storage I found the handle of the mug had snapped off. Now it was time to see if all those Crazy Glue commercials were telling the truth.

I repaired the mug, wrapped it up, and was able to re-gift as well as re-joke. But … if someone had taken a sledge hammer to the mug and reduced it to a fine white powder, no amount of Crazy Glue would help. There would be no doubt that it was irrevocably broken, smashed to bits, and it would take some sort of deranged magical thinking to think that it even could be fixed.

But what if I ignored the blatantly obvious and dedicated a little time every day to try and “repair” the mug? And even though my sister’s 40th birthday had come and gone, I still tried each day to force a mound of powder back into being a functioning coffee mug. You might say I was a little … um … strange … for even thinking about it, but as long as I kept my obsession a secret, and continued to function normally in my day-to-day life, no one would be the wiser. But as soon as you found out I’d spent almost 14 years at it, you’d definitely know I had blown my wheels. I do believe I’d fit the definition of suffering a psychotic break with reality.

A “psychotic break with reality” means hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, or feeling something that does not exist. Or believing something to be true that is false, fixed, and fantastic. Simply put, the person loses contact with external reality.