As a retired musician (songwriting is a curse until one is paid therefore, at which point it is instantaneously transformed into a blessing), I was at once riled and reviled by the rampant idiocy on display when fellow hopeful plyers of the melodic (or in their cases often at best pseudo-melodic) wares were so freely and even with inexplicable pride stealing blind their fellow artists via the pirated download.

The myriad rationalizations furiously delivered by any and all of the song larcenists for why they were thusly justified all smacked of tacit acknowledgement of the speciousness of their actions, but revealed the departure in totality of the shame that once upon a time accompanied the words and deeds of the self-aware liar and the inner-cognizant thief.

I would vainly endeavor to explain the very expensive and quite prohibitive industry process that leads to the successful completion of a popular studio recording, and that they were not only pilfering their fellow chanteurs, but also the record companies that they so cavalierly dismissed as E-vile that were in actuality their only hope of one day hearing the words, "You will never again have to wait another table; sign here".

Every dollar the labels lose on a song for which they should have been compensated is a dollar they can not invest in the next artistic hopeful. Meaning the dreamful purloiners currently under consideration are that much further from a contractual life reprieve.

This nation was founded on the concept of rugged individualism, the sweat of one's brow and the keeping of the fruits of one's labor whence the day is done. No longer are we so moored.

The New Deal

We are now adrift, tethered instead to this new, warped and distorted view, "What very little that is mine is mine, and all that is yours is mine, simply because I want it".

Do not wish to pay for the prescription drugs that are saving or prolonging your miserable existence? Simply incept the tantrum, and they will be governmentally delivered free of charge (to you), along with the diminutive and innovatively destructive price caps that always accompany the involvement of the Leviathan. Never mind the debilitative costs of the testing of thousands of drugs that never see the light of market day, all in the daunting pursuit of the successful one for which these companies now have the audacity to ask of you remuneration.

It is far easier for those of elective bent to patronize the ill-informed in our midst by demonizing Big Pharmo (or insert pertinent industry here, Oil, Tobacco, Food, ...) than it is to undertake the free market explanative process long ago forsaken by the governmental school system.

There are a great many dry holes drilled by Exxon-Mobil and their petroleum ilk in the ongoing effort to deliver us the gasoline goods. Their corporate profit rate of 8 and 1/2% is well below the other industries standard of 17%-20% investments return and less than half of the 18% federal take on the product and the producers the latter does nothing to bring to bear, but of late does everything to denigrate.

Rather than government removing the largest of all impediments, which is itself, it instead engages in the counterproductive further taxation of their "profiteering", and cuts pintsize checks to those of such low income that the vast majority thereof can not afford the automobiles that run on the petroleum from which said alleged excesses are culled.

Blending In?

And on Monday, the "Papers? We don't need no stinking papers" contingent made itself sub-minimally known, exhibiting that the one facet of assimilation to which they have actually taken is the ignoble characteristic of whining on demand. They again gleefully exhibited their accrued ignorance and impudence and issued en español their inane demands for the tremendous blessing that is United States citizenship in exchange for them doing, ceding or giving up nothing.

Allegiance to our new land? Forget it, this is not America, this is Aztlán. Acquisition of the ability to speak the native tongue? Pero no. Just keep those welfare checks, free hospital visits and niño educations coming, and you may throw (what we view to be ancillary) citizenship into the mix should you wish. Oh, and we will be sending for every relative we ever had to join us aboard the sucker gringo Gravy Train.

Of paramount import is the fact that we are already here, with access to all of the goodies, so you can keep your de jure noisome parchments, we de facto do not need them. Should we indeed get them, please so issue in PDF or Word format, so that we might readily download them and begin again going about our business of bleeding your nation inexorably out of existence.