So, here, we technoverts are gathered, hanging out in Hell's Waiting Room, or some antecedent zone, propped up on a mushy, trashed sofa, pitched down and to the right via a missing caster, accidentally and unintentionally side-saddle surfing against gravity, counterbalancing ourselves and our black coffee the color of burnt brimstone in a gleaming-white styrofoam cup, eyeing the other options in seating:  one of the mismatched, armless, straight-backed, metal-legged, vinyl-covered, dinette-set sort of chairs.  Or else, it's the lumpy, lumpen utility seat and camouflaged toy chest in the corner, a mute ottoman in this woebegone empire.

There's an ancient, wooly mammoth of a real-wood, entertainment center and console teevee playing, as the rest of it grazes on the piebald, black-and-white carpet, the color scheme mimicking the screen.  Across the room, the picture image alternates its view between hissing snow and a slow-roller of a channel, where the image is always scrolling up, in erratic, self-set speeds.

Initial jobless claims dropped again last week to a four year low, taking us back to the early days of Bush meltdown. We really can’t begin sing “Happy days are here again” until claims drop from the current 348,000/week to under 300,000, but we are moving in the right direction. The survey of economists had predicted a sharp rise in claims, but these are the same economists that are almost always wrong. Why do reporters quote them? You would get a better prediction by flipping a coin.

Monthly home sales numbers are up 9% over last year, but down one percent from the previous month. The number of houses currently on the market is actually down to a four month supply, which is good news for the economy. This allows people who want to move, or build their dream house sell their current home, and this should build a reinforcing cycle.

No, we won't be going down into the basement dungeon with these goons -- we've heard all about these gory, gut-wrenching, gut-slashing movies -- but we will walk down one or two stairs, shine the flashlight around, see if they've added any new chains to the wall.  Looks like it's all the same stuff down here -- except for the half-finished, half-hearted start on clasps with Idaho's state seal.

Most everything is still in place, here in the dungeon of the legal rape of women, a museum of GOP achievements, coming between women and their doctors.  Still legal to rape women in Texas with forced sonograms, under a law passed by 15 men and 2 women, all wielding black arts and books of spells. Virginia's waffling around, first plunging in probes, now retreating to on-and-around -- but, rape is still rape, no matter the degree, at least, by any definition of hell on this Earth.

There will be more copy-cat, piling-on later, you know how this works with inhumane humans, so eager to add to the list.  Formerly pseudo-sane places will be right along, like Pennsylvania -- home of the Santorum -- and Alabama, Georgia, and other viper pits of unabashedly stout religious fevers and fervors, snake-handler style, speaking in tongues, mostly forked.

We could buy Real Fireworks for the 4th of July because we lived near the Port Madison Indian Reservation in Washington state. No wimpy sparklers for us. None of that Safe N Sane garbage. These were definitely Unsafe and Insane. We could buy stuff that exploded. As SCTVs Billy Sol Hurock and Big Jim McBob used to say, It blowed up real good.

I was about to set off a rocket slightly smaller than a cruise missile when I noticed a warning on the box, Use under adult supervision.

Well I guess that would be me. A crazed adolescent in an aging body with an arsenal of dangerous, albeit colorful, explosives. I lit the fuse and ran. It shot up a couple of hundred feet and KA-WHAP. A pyrotechnic chrysanthemum lit up the sky over our house with a sonic boom that rattled our windows. Another successful 4th of July. Nothing caught on fire and everybody still had all their fingers. As we walked back into the house I realized I finally looked old enough to do all the stuff I couldnt possibly get away with as a teenager.

It could be that religious right-wingers have a point, in a manner of speaking -- and, no, we're not talking about the sharp, pointy one high atop each GOP member's head.  Settle down and think about this, now:  It is possible demonology offers one of the few avenues of exploration left that may give any satisfaction at all, when it comes to knowing the source for the sudden increases and rise in numbers of so many depraved demons living here among us, spouting such intolerant and unbelievable bile, cloaking it all as God-given, holier-than-thou speech.

Mass hallucination, panic, and hysteria have mostly been ruled out -- but not demon-possession -- as the cause for this sudden, over-the-top burst of sanctimonious, patronizing, priggish-male, little-boy, pig-headedness:  The idea that only aging white men, mostly below the old Mason-Dixon line, are the only possible arbiters left alive where women's health care is concerned.  Women have a right to be concerned about where this madness is headed, as so much of the lunatic GOP focus has been below women's waistlines, and above the hems of their skirts.

Recapping now, see if this is set correctly in our minds:  Money is speech. Lying speech in the news is OK and legal, corporations are people, human beings are no longer Personnel if they are lucky enough to find work, but are instead, Resources, like something to be mined, chopped down, drained off, or drilled into -- which, come to think of it, explains why we keep getting turned on this huge screw, again and again, the screw blades attached to this long, painful shaft.

We're upset Syria tortures its people, even though this was among a few bloody handfuls of destinations, CIA-package drop zones for suspects we wanted "tuned-up" at the hands of very special-techniques investigators and interrogators?