As I have complained of myself in earlier posts, I have not been able to maintain the daily flow of writing that oozed out during the Bush years. Say what you will about George Bush, he was at least inspirational.

Still I gasp at the news everyday, simply appalled. And by "news" I don't mean the real-world events that appal almost all of us—such as the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti—but the mad irreality of politics hurling us into abysses into which we need not go. Capitalism is the chief propellant, purchasing opinions and paying for their distribution throughout the American media and to a lesser degree throughout the media of other first-world nations.

Wealth and the power that attends it are now so concentrated that I'm not sure whether there is sufficient force to mount a credible resistance—at least in the "developed" countries. If there is, it will have to come from anger, desperation—and information. Anger and desperation, which we see for instance in the Tea Party movement, easily become merely ludicrous—not to mention exploitable—when the bearers of these sentiments are uninformed or misinformed, as most of us are.

So without much hope that the impetus toward neofeudalism can be halted, I'm picking up my proverbial pen again to "rage against the dying of the light." But because I feel no more capable today than I did yesterday of producing lengthier pieces, I've decided to resort to the "twought" until such time as I may recover. The twought, in the Simply Appalling lexicon, is a writing that is somewhat longer than a "tweet" but shorter than a fully elaborated thought.

Perhaps some commenter will provide the elaboration—or induce me to do it.