Sick of the Rat Race

I'm a government worker who spends most of my life in an office cubicle. My job is mind-numbingly boring and my boss is a moron blinded by his own personal agendas and neuroses. I absolutely dread the thought of languishing in this (or a similar) situation for the rest of my so-called productive life.

Hauling my ass out of bed at the crack of dawn, stuck in a cubicle until dinnertime 5 days a week. Only 10 days of vacation every year. No opportunity to earn extra time off or pay even though I have to work overtime on a regular basis. Constantly being judged by the boss and co-workers on everything I say and do. Absolutely NO positive reinforcement beyond a necessary paycheck. I'm looking at another 25 years of this bullshit, at the end of which I'll be old, spent and broken down. My life has become completely grey. Where's the joy I used to feel? Where's the excitement and hope for the future? I can't pay rent or buy food if I don't have a job. Plus I have family members that depend on me financially. Are the alternatives: (1) spending the rest of my life in a cubicle with an idiot boss; (2) dropping out of society, living in a cardboard box and dumpster diving; or (3) death?

Yeah, I know alot of people have it harder and/or hate their jobs, but that doesn't make me feel much better. It's my blog and I can bitch if I want to. It's nothing spectacular, just the drip, drip, drip Chinese water torture of quiet desperation.

Martial Law in the USA

One "lesson" (opportunity) from Katrina: Bush wants to use troops to enforce bird flu quarantines. Any excuse will do....Be (more) afraid!

Bush military bird flu role slammed
Bush wants troops to enforce bird flu quarantines
Bush cites military takeover in case of flu outbreak
Governors shun Bush military plan

Gene Healy, a senior editor at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, also panned Bush's idea. "Having already wrecked a legendary American city, Hurricane Katrina may now be invoked to undermine a fundamental principle of American law; that principle, enshrined in the Posse Comitatus Act, is that when it comes to domestic policing, the military should be a last resort, not a first responder," he said

Counting Corpses

Gotta love those Bush-people. Once the body count got too high for comfort, they did the only logical thing; they stopped counting

So, with the death toll of Katrina at 964, our government decides to stop counting. I guess the corpses of more than 1,000 people (some sort of "acceptable" threshhold) is just to much to lay at the feet of our fearless leaders.

I've found the friend I refer to in posts below, evacuated to Baton Rouge after the storm. When the death toll was around 400, she told me, "Shoot, that many people were probably killed by the cops alone."

And how does this jive with the huge numbers of people still missing? How many of these missing people are actually dead? Will we ever know? Just like the ban on journalists photographing bodies (out of "respect" - yeah, just like in Iraq)...this whole thing stinks as bad as the toxic sludge covering New Orleans.

Edited to add: It's no coincidence that FEMA hired Kenyon International to count the bodies. Kenyon, it seems, is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), a scandal-ridden Texas-based company operated by a friend of the Bush family. Recently, SCI subsidiaries have been implicated in illegally discarding and desecrating corpses. One of many stories about this can be read here. Another one is here.