Direct Action: An Historical Novel
changing the world – one arrest at a time!
Shawn Langlois of MarketWatch flagged this marvelously sickening screenshot from CNBC’s Jim Cramer (Mad Money): “Everything that is wrong with America.”
While millions lose jobs and faced financial ruin, the Dow chalks up its best week in 80 years.
Of course, that prior “best” was during the Great Depression, so maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised.
Economic Musings by Luke Hauser – short and sometimes funny!
ABC News reports that a coven of masked witches attempted and failed to levitate US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY).
The masked pagans surrounded the hapless politician at the Kentucky Statehouse and demanded that he speak out for social justice during this time of national crisis. When McConnell failed to recognize the meaning of word “justice,” the protesters turned to Plan B – levitate the banana slug until the next election.*
Sadly, McConnell had his shields (if not his face mask) in place, and remained rooted to the marble floor.
The coven vowed to hold online zoom rituals to boost their psychic powers and shift their attention to levitating the President during one of his daily televised coronavirus rallies.
Photo and original report from This Week ABC.
More satires from Luke Hauser: https://directaction.org/category/satires/
* – UPDATE – Responding to a flurry of complaints from readers, Luke Hauser apologizes to banana slugs everywhere!
I think we found the perfect symbol of the Trump era.
Sometimes satire just can’t keep up.
Image: CreativeMarket.com
To all venture capitalists and others with too much money on their hands:
My company is called ToiletShare – we sublet time-share toilets to techies. After all, you can’t “function” without toilets!
Our innovative, cutting edge, high tech idea is – most of the time, toilets are sitting unoccupied. What if instead of paying for toilet-time you don’t use, you simply paid for a block of toilet time that you and your employees could use at your discretion?
ToiletShare maintains a worker-friendly environment, with quality reading material and relaxing muzak.
Bonus – ToiletShare monitors all toilet-related activity and provides a complete monthly report of employee toilet usage.
Can we have $5 billion for starts?
Photo – Tokyo Weekender
More economics satires & musings by Luke Hauser
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Direct Action author Luke Hauser helped launch the infamous Funky Nixons, known in the Bay Area as the House Band of Peoples Park (ie, we played there a lot and provided backup for other performers).
Although Hauser – now a part-time recluse living under assumed names due to unremitting pursuit by international espionage agents – left the band years ago, the rest of the crew persists in their nefarious career, and perform several times a year in the Bay Area.
Streaming income supports this website! Get to it!
Screw the Rich
L.A. Driver
Smoke a Joint with Jesus
We Support the Troops
Immigrant Man
Barbara Bush’s Dog
In honor of the Apollo anniversary, Gil Scott Heron’s classic celebration of all that is America.
Gil Scott Heron – Whitey On the Moon
RIP 1949-2011.
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Lately I’ve noticed an ugly phenomenon in our fair bayside communities – careless and inconsiderate pedestrians have been taking over the sidewalks, forcing legally-sanctioned scooter riders to dodge, swerve, and ultimately to dismount and walk their electrified vehicles!
This has got to stop! Unfortunately, no one acts more entitled than a pedestrian on a sidewalk.
We need to get pedestrians under control before someone gets hurt. When I see scooters constantly having to dodge people on foot, I know it’s just a matter of time until a careless pedestrian is going to accidentally hit and kill a scooter rider. I’m surprised it hasn’t accidentally happened already. Those kind of accidents are to be expected when pedestrians get out of control.
I propose that all sidewalks be marked with clear lanes, and pedestrians be required to stay in their lane unless they signal a turn at least 50 feet in advance.
Anyone intending to walk around SF or Oakland must obtain a license; provide proof of insurance (in case they accidentally hurt a scooter or a scooter-rider); and at all times wear a helmet, kneepads, and turn signals.
Ultimately, our urban vision must eliminate pedestrians entirely from the city. If enough scooters are strewn around on sidewalks and streets and dumpsters and lakes, there will no longer be any excuse for walking.
Join our campaign to eliminate pedestrianism! Email bartcourier@gmail.com
Image: San Francisco activists pile yuppie scooters in front of techie megabus.
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Build a wall to stop homo sapiens from traveling across the continent?
The Rocky Mountains didn’t stop people. The Bering Strait didn’t stop people.
And you think a wall will do it? Maybe if you include lots of decorative razor wire?
Let me pause briefly to explain capitalism.
Sometimes there’s a demand for a product, or for labor, or for a better place to live – and as if by magic, a supply crops up to fill it!
It’s almost like there’s an invisible hand benignly guiding the whole operation.
People want flat-screen TVs? Capitalism fills the demand (and fills the Earth with the old models – more on that presently).
People want illegal drugs and non-prescription pharmaceuticals? There’ll be a supply – you can bet your stock-market money on it.
People demand better snack bars? Voila, Nugo bars, with 12 grams of protein and they taste like a Snickers bar! Now that’s progress!
So – when US farmers need cheap labor, when US yuppies need cheap house-cleaners, or when the CIA ransacks Latin American countries and induces people to trek hundreds of miles in search of a livable home – gee, small surprise that a supply rises to fill the demand.
Walls will never stop the law of supply and demand. There’s never been a wall, or a sea, that could stop humans bent on their destination.
Nor will walls stop 911-style fanatics or Oklahoma City-type domestic terrorists, which some people think might be a greater threat than the Southern border.
(Nor will walls stop rising sea levels. But that’s another – if closely related – story)
No, if we want to secure the Beloved Capitalist Homeland (ie, the patches of Earth that on maps are labelled “USA”), a wall will simply never work.
We need a dome.
And not just any dome, but one designed by American ingenuity and technological prowess.
A noble dome, projecting our justice-loving essence upward and outward toward a hostile world that hates us because we are so free.
Picture it – a shiny bubble of ultra-high-tech plasticene, crowning our purple mountains’ majesty, above the fruit-filled plains where our much-revered corporate farms grow the bio-engineered self-harvesting foodstuffs that will sustain us after we fire all of the immigrant laborers.
And the jobs it will create! The plastics industry will boom. Engineers will grow rich computing and testing the exact parabolic arch of the dome. Universities will wax fat on the research handouts.
Even manual laborers will find work cleaning and polishing the dome’s inviolable surface.
We face a national crisis! The government is stymied by legislative paralysis, party politics, lack of vision, and the Bozo in the Oval Office.
We The People must act to ensure our domestic security. If we begin constructing a dome, the American electorate will rally to our righteous cause, and the government will be compelled to assist us!
Please contribute generously, and we will begin building a dome now! Or at least talking a lot about it!
Email small, unmarked bills to: BuildTheDomeNow@Scammail.us
Freedom now! Build the Dome!
Decorative razor wire photo from Military Times.
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Unbelievably, all 15 back issues of the Bosse BullSheet – an early-1970s high school underground co-produced by Luke Hauser – have resurfaced, thanks to the archival prowess of co-producer Fritz Elmendorf!
Click here for back issues of the BullSheet!
I think I’ve found my new activist calling. I am going to apply to be a cultural influencee.
First I thought I might try to be an influencer. But it looks like you have to do stuff like go on the internet all the time and tell people your innermost random thoughts and all the times someone disses you at a nightclub. That doesn’t sound very fun.
But when I look at the people who are becoming influencers, it’s an impressive bunch – we’re talking Cardi B, Keireth Knightly, and even Steph Curry. Women, people of color, women who are people of color, people of color who are trans women, trans women who are not yet people of color but aspire one day to be – my kind of folks!
I started thinking – maybe instead of trying to be a famous influencer myself, I should endeavor to support these already-famous celebrities of diversity.
When they do something that aims to influence people, such as denouncing the president or wearing a new brand of shoes, I could be among the first to be influenced.
I’d be sort of an early adopter of influences.
Of course, it would be just my luck that I’d wind up starting a trend, and pretty soon everyone would want to be the first in line to be influenced by famous influencers. I’d have to tweet press releases disclaiming any intent to actually influence people to be influenced, all the while realizing that my denial was likely to influence impressionable people to start yet another trend.
So for the record – please respect my desire not to start a cultural trend by becoming an influencee. Go find your own way to impact society!
You can support my efforts to become a cultural influencee by donating to my Anarchist A-Go-Go fund – email small, unmarked bills or large chunks of unsweetened chocolate to: <directactionnovel@gmail.com>
Photo: Famous cultural icon Cardi B, shown here influencing people to make weird faces.
