hysterical historical memory

"the u s senate unanimously approved a resolution deploring china's use of force in the south china sea and calling for peaceful multilateral resolution of maritime disputes in southeast asia."
reuters 6-27-2011

the whores in the imperial senate are either hubris filled hypocrites ( this gets my vote ) or seriously challenged in matters of their nation's past...i am no expert ( many will agree...i don't much care) but i have completed thirty-nine hours of university level history classes and i have been involved ( off and on ) in writing local history for thirty years...so off the top of my head ( without recourse to the stacks of books around here) i am going to bring up some episodes , both from the recent and more distant past of the empire which will vex those of you who have been rendered stupid by the media and the political cant that passes for debate around here and annoy those of you who have stumbled innocently on this hotbed of subversion because you typed in historical humor and punched "i'm feeling lucky" ( that will teach you to rely on luck)direct intervention by the empire or its proxies:
afghanistan. if this puzzles you read a newspaper.
cambodia. illegal invasion 1970.
chile. complicity in the overthrow of the allende government by that ratbag nixon.
cuba. from 1898 until 1959 degenerate playground of imperial wealth.
dominican republic 1965. another carribean nation unable to control its poor.
el salvador. dutch reagan's cocaine funded contras.
greneada. see dominican republic.
guatemeala. complicity in the overthrow of the arbenz government in 1954 and dutch's contras again.
hawaii. dole overthrew the monarchy and the us got a naval base, a state, and a birther movement.
honduras. see el salvador.
iran. 1953 overthrow of the mossadegh government and installation of the shah. reminded of long-term iranian memory in 1979. there are ALWAYS consequences...this will become more obvious as the imperial decline deepens.
iraq. sad story of a one time client and proxy (saddam and son's) gone rouge, insisting on developing their own policies. perhaps one of the imperial last hurrahs.
korea. just look at it...last bastion of the cold war...beloved of political scientists and jimmy carter.
mexico. quietly retaking its northwestern provinces lost in 1845 much to the chagrin of the squatters in arizona and tha nativist yahoos in texas ( let the bastards go!).
nicaragua. long-time favorite target of imperial intervention since the 1850's. i would draw your attention to smedley butler's musings on the uses of the marines in racketeering.
panama. see iraq and insert noriega instead of hussein.
phillipines. ugly counter insurgency fighting people who thought we promised them self-determination...field test of the colt .380 side arm.
serbia. while the serbs were not saints in the collapse of yugoslavia by any means they also cannot take all the blame...still lots of unresolved issues from the 1940s...clinton's airwar was an expensive piece of macho posturing by a bubba.
somalia. what was that about?
vietnam. imperial eyeopener form my youth...death of any respect for the political trade...birthplace of whoredom and degenerate scum...defrocked clerics, used car salesmen, and lawyers banding together to expand and preserve the haniltonian plutocracy...fuck these people.

still feeling lucky?

propagandized and bludgeoned

whores first:
in the last week i have been subject to visclosky's revenge more times the bush II mispronouced "nuclear"...on the eighteenth senator kristen gillibrand from new york told me how horrible the economy would be if the republicans and their populist tea party drones gained control of the country by staging an electoral coup in the senate...on the twenty-first senator barbra mikulski from the swamps of maryland told me pretty much the same thing...on the twenty-second dick durbin from illinois stuck his ugly mug into my yahoo account (damn visclosky!) and pounded home the same point in the somewhat more oleagenous style of illinois politics...today harry reid and some low level aparatchik named jason rosenbaum have further aggravated my already overburdened patience with the same damned tired old panic stricken bullshit gibberish...let me say i do not care if the republicans control the empire in perpetuity because there is NO substantive difference between them, the democrats, or the whores-in-waiting from the tea party...if the degenerate bastards had provided and "unsubscribe" link i would have sent them packing but that freak visclosky saw to it that the link was "misplaced" on my emails...thoroughly buried in the graphics or something...just wait til i see that fucker again.

unions and philosophers: (as incongruous as the diad seems there is a tenuous connection)

"starting with this consciousness of scarcity the (european) 'manualist' groups have been led to practicing solidarity, to an insistance on an 'ownership' by the group of a whole of the totality of economic opportunity extant, to a 'rationing' by the group of such opportunity among the individuals constituting it, to a control by the group over its memebers in relation to the conditions upon which they as individuals are permitted to occupy a portion of that opportunity-in brief a 'communism of opportunity.'...but, in this country, due to the fact that here the 'manualist' found an abundance of opportunity, in unoccupied land ( nothing eurocentric or racist about that, huh coach?)and in a pioneer social condition, his economic thinking therefore had issued, not from the scarcity premise but from the premise of abundance. it thus resulted in a social philosophy which was more akin to he businessmen's than to the trade unionists' or the guildsmen's. accordingly the american labor movement, which long remained unaware of any distinctions between itself and the 'producing classes' in general-which also included farmers, small manufacturers, and small businessmen,- continued to worship at the shrine of indivdualistic 'anti monopoly.' "

"the typical manualist is aware of his lack of native capacity for availing himself of economic opportunities as they lie amidst the the complesx and ever shifiting situations of modern business. he knows himself neither for a born taker of risks nor for the possesor of a suficiently agile mind to ever feel at home in the midst of the uncertain game of competitive business...basically the businessman is an economic individualist par excellence...his indivdualism shows up clearest during periods of great economic expansion. when markets are becoming rapidly extended and technology revolutionized; in other words when opportunity is expanding by leaps and bounds, then his competitiveness approaches the ruthlessness of a darwinian struggle for his exisitence. the elder rockerfeller and andrew carnegie, moral men who raised competitiveness to an ethic, are indeed excellent examples."

selig perlman from " a theory of the labor movemement"
(just coincidence that i received my dues receipt form the business union i belong to as i read old selig?)


i have always loathed selig perlman and defy any of you to convince me that he was anything but an apologist for greed...he idealized workers and capitalists in to simple and utterly laughable stereotypes that so distort the reality of labor relations and the motivations involved that it is patently impossible to take it seriously...he sprang fully loaded from the head of that saint of capitalist rationalizations, john r commons and the biased creep never looked back...one would have hoped that wall street's recent attempts to make something out of nothing in an attempt to ensure "continued growth" would have shown that true economy is a zero sum game with finite limits where someone has more because someone else has less...this would seem to indicate greed more than ability as a motivator in acquisition of wealth...only a complete moron could help but prosper in "periods of great economic expansion" when "opportunity is expanding by leaps and bounds"...figuring out how to do more with less and injecting some resilience into an economic system that has reached its limits of "easy" growth and has little to do but contract will take a somewhat different mentality... in purely evolutionary terms "fittest" means those individuals best adapted to their environment and able to pass their traits on through sexual selection...not who has the biggest claws, best appetite, and no fucking scruples...only capitalists admire this shit...rockerfeller and carnegie ethical?...i almost puked when i read that twenty years ago and it still makes my gorge rise...rockerfeller bilked the federal government during the civil war and carnegie let frick do the dirty work so he could pretend to be a philanthropist while living like the laird he was...august fourteenth is the annivrsary of selig's demise...party at my house.

subjectivist line II

"what rendered the gap-toothed crack whores and meth dealers mostly invisible to them was the convenient social subdivision variously called the jewish ghetto, the red light district,...the combat zone, the zona de tolerancia, the bad side of town,...or the wrong side of the tracks. willed blindness was accordingly not needed for the walled-off seekers of tranquility. the poor kept themselves physically out of sight! if one had no business on the wrong side of the tracks why go there, especially when going there increased one's risk of being robbed, assaulted, or annoyed?"

"it works both ways. how often have you seen a panhandler inside a gated community? anyone unbalanced enough to play such a visible part would imedeately get rapidly neutralized by uniformed antibodied, flushed out of the social body."
from "poor people" by william t vollmann

i touched on the the legal and social mechanisms that keep the poor out of the line-of-sight of "nice people"in an earlier blog... not as well as vollmann...but it's true none the less...the photos are from different parts of gary...26th avenue just a couple of blocks off martin luther king drive...or 15th avenue west of broadway..or in glen park not all that far form iu northwest...i can think of a number of local readers who may have had reason to go down these streets in recent times, but how many people from hobart or portage or say munster have ventured down there recently? the ruins of mid-level and small time economic failure abound...from boarded up storefronts to the wreckage of the dairy that delivered our milk when i was an adolescent...ghettoized by obsolescence or failure...removed from the mainstream and left to get by as best they can...far removed enough that you only read about them in the newspaper...don't even make the big-time of electronic media...just a passing glance...forgotten...blighted because they no longer contribute significantly to "the social body"...perception is everything...i'd like to blame post-modernism for this but perception pre-dates it....stalin ( who found that power obviated the need for wealth..or, rather, achieved power on the basis of something other than wealth which is what the west really hated) was wont to say that some people dressed elegantly to show their wealth while others did so to conceal their poverty...in this era of massive economic decline ( despite the smoke and mirrors propaganda emanating from the centers of hopeful, wealth based, power) you have to wonder how many people living in those gated communities have clothed themselves in debt to conceal their decline...ghettoized by a pretense of social and economic success into crippling economic fantasy...be careful what you pretend to be.

now is the crisis

"we can't allow republicans and their skewed priorities to control the senate and they will if they gain just four more seats. what you do right now truly matters! please give a minimum of $5 or more to dscc. every dollar you give will be matched and will help keep republicans out of power in the senate. i'm counting on you to help stop them."
senator patty murray stumping for cash in a mass email addressed to me personally because fucking visclosky gave them my email address.


"it is natural of men who wish to hasten the adoption of a measure to tell us now is the crisis. now is the critical moment which must be seized or all will be lost."
william henry lee in an astute observation on hamiltonian scare tactics.

"i don't listen to the radio. i am tired of listening to fables."
an astute observation on the intent and content of modern mass media by nikolai vasilyevich sokolov in the book "poor people" by william t vollmann.

as we dig deeper into the hideous layers of farce that politics in the late empire has become ( "weiner resigns!"...resignation? where is the lake of fire?) and cover ourselves with the putrescence of another presidential election i find myself in desperate need of a place to retreat to to escape all the vacuous posturing and lame, tired, formulaic rhetoric that passes for campaigning...i can empathize with nikolai when he despairs of the falsehood and manipulation he faces when what he needs is information ( goebbels smiles down from pr heaven...giddy at the success of his variation of walter lippmann's take on that saint of bullshit john dewey)...i for one don't care what weiner's underwear looks like or who said what about gingrich's wife or if sarah palin is a shrewd political operative hiding behind a facade of hockey-mom banality...the whole process of political prestidigitation is so utterly divorced from the reality people face in the street that it is virtually impossible to take seriously...bureaucrats, lobbyists, scabrous whores all have a vested interest in keeping their spots at the public trough open and the pork flowing...which is precisely why, despite the dogmatic libertarian, market mechanism, self-reliance rhetoric that these bozos spout NOTHING substantive will change...they will simply take more from the taxpayer ( the real definition of "the people's business") in the form of hidden taxes or draconian cuts in social spending at exactly the time it is necessary...(all politicians are social darwinists who somehow believe they deserve to be the elite and that "the voter"s" sole purpose is to validate their status every two to six years)...edward trevelyan would nod approvingly...and as if the degenerates don't already take enough from me now that clapped out tart from west virginia wants me to contribute anything i can ( "sorry, we cannot accept amounts less then five american dollars!") to help keep the senate from being taken over by rapacious addled wrong-headed automatons devoted to class warfare and maintaining the interests of the degenerate pashas who conroll them...how do you tell someone this dense that it is too fucking late?

where do you draw the subjectivist line?

"the rich and the poor had each availed themselves of precisely the extreme examples that will best serve their case, examples that will have to be conceded by the 'other side'...the implicit purpoose of these competing ideologies is not just to convince, but to control; better stated, they aim to control by convincing."
james scott from "weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance"

" the market- what marxists used to call the cash nexus. more generally an ideology of ranking and valuing everything according to its perceived monetary value."

"after all, the victorian prescription, quiet recrimination, remains the most widely sold elixir in our pharmacopeia of expectations for the poor."

"people who are poor but not in imminent danger of perishing have more of a chance of catching their breath and actually conceptualizing their poverty."
willam t vollmann from "poor people"

and it is fear of that "conceptualizing" that keeps the bureaucrats in the pay of the economic elite searching for new ways to force the poor to spend their time scrambling to make sure their "paperwork" is in order...or meeting new requirements for entitlments...or quietly going underground and submitting to "the market" and its mechanisms that insure inequities...perpetuate stereotypes and "quiet recriminations"...( and let's not forget the tendency of the legal system to make the side-effects of poverty, such as loitering, vagrancy, begging, etc. vaugely described crimes so that the forces of law and order [agents of an oppressor class] can keep the unsightly detritus eroded from the system out of sight of "nice people"...why demonize the poor as "shiftless"? because they do not contribute to the holy growth of the gdp...if you cannot or will not agrandize wealth you may as well not exist) i am not poor...i have never felt particularly deprived at any point in my life even though there have been difficulties...there are, no doubt, many who would characterize me as such and my working class subdivision as a row of crackerbox hovels ( they might also characterize me as stupid, or lazy, or unmotivated, or brainwashed, or genetically inferior for stubbornly remaining as i am...well...fuck my critics...we do not move in the same circles...they are clueless, and, judging by the behavior of the market recently, utterly doomed...just too boxed in by their self-perceptions and need for "growth" to see the writing on the wall...i will be too busy to celebrate capital's demise...but i won't miss it)...once your basic material needs are met ( "...not in imminent danger of perishing...) poverty becomes an interior landscape informed by temperment and culture...while i hesitate to dignify the consumerist utopia by calling it a culture, like it or not it is what informs our concepts of poverty through the drug injection system of the mass media ( the "control by convincing" part i borrowed form james scott [thanks for the tip captain...great book])...engineered desire...a mass comparison of self to "the market's" idea of what a consumer should be..pretty far removed form what actually makes people happy...look at all the useless crap you have lying about that profited someone else when you bought it but you don't really use...i have some ( i was enculturated by tv like everybody else around here...but the tv broke when i was twelve and we didn't get another one until i was nineteen...those seven years played hell with the programming...that and the acid)...i have been giving it to the salvation army or goodwill or the landfill recently in an effort to pare back the sheer mass and to do some "conceptualizing" about what actually constitutes the "poverty" in my life...there is some...but it has nothing to do with material goods...goodwill industries and better world books are seeing to that and allowing me to move as far outside the consumerist utopia as possible with out cutting all ties and moving to the wilderness...no doubt there will be many who disagree with my assesment of current events...fine...i haven't been shy with my criticisms...life is subjectivist, non-linear, and empirical...we can neither be right or wrong all the time...i just call 'em like i see 'em...so sue me.


6-11-2011 8:08 pm

"any census of unemployed persons would be forced of necessity to include the shiftless and unemployable sections of the popultion, as well as those on the borderland of unemployment."
encylopedia britannica 1911 edition

a fine british imperial edwardian social darwinist interpretation of the lower castes of society...inherently blaming the unemployable for their condition and equating them with shiftlessness while recognizing the necessity of a pool of unemployed to the smooth functioning of industrial capitalism...doubtlessly some edwardian academic was responsible for the article arguing against any sort of effort to quantify the unemployed...if you delineate the problem you might be forced to actually do something about it so ignore it...analogous to christian science's " to name it is to claim it" and a hangover from the victorian inabillity to address any sort of isssue that might reflect badly on the social ordering fostered by an aristocratic elite...i'd love the brits if they weren't such reprehensible shits ( scotch and irish in extraction on dad's side...celtic loathing of anything anglo-saxon may be genetic ) no wonder they loved maggie.

whoretown in heat...

"weiner won't quit."
associated press 6-6-2011

(bloggers photo uploader is down for maintenance so no iconic syndaclism til later)

why should he? christ on a bike, he fits right in...heir to a long and storied history of congressional psychosis and deviant behavior laced with delusions of grandure and giddy hubris...don't belive me? fanny fox...remember her? if that eludes you then all i should have to do is say ted kemmedy and the scales should fall from your eyes in a blinding flash of recognition of the absolute lunacy that drags down even the most solid members of the ruling elite after they have spent years doing "the people's business" and buying into the lame pr that surrounds the hamitonian third republic ( the second republic allowed teddy's older brother to indulge his taste for trashy blonds with a nudge and a wink...nixon screwed that all up for those that followed him...ironic when you think of how jealous he was of old jack...but nixon was a purely political animal...focused on power and his legacy to posterity and posessed of all the charm of a wart...tainted with a massive inferiority complex tempered by bursts of meglomania...kissinger thought he was crazy...i'm just glad the sick bastard is gone leaving me in peace)...as the end of economic growth and the irrational system of debt masquerading as an economy continue to manifest themselves in a declining standard of living the political cadre will become weirder and more shrill in its approach to assuming and maintaining power..weiner will either become a nonentity or be remembered as a brilliant political strategist who first discovered that underwear and social networking were the new tools of the political trade in the late empire...either way it shakes out...footnote or entire chapter in the great book of imperial decline...this sort of abberant behavior and the unreconstructed gibberish that spin doctors and political analysts use to try to explain or define it isn't going to leave the political landscape soon...wierd is the new normal...i am about to come into my own.

junk sickness

"the global commission on drug policy called for a new approach of reducing drug abuse to replace the current strategy of strictly criminalizing drugs and incarcerating drug users while battling criminal cartels that control the drug trade."
reuters 6-2-2011

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/ehn/Web/release/testimony.html

obviously none of the anal retentive morons that think dutch reagan's idea of "just say no" and jailing anyone who says yes is functional don't have a clue about how addiction or the system of illicit ( only bcause of legislation) drug traffic really works...bozos...idiots...fools...i could go on but i am dealing with some time pressure here...anyone who has overcome a chemical dependency knows how to take the entire trade down...bill burroughs wrote a primer on it years ago that obviously the dea views as some sort of deranged propaganda form the delusional world of drug users...except bill wasn't using when he wrote it and he knows whereof he speaks...so turn the whole problem over to those of us who have some concrete idea of what it takes to resolve an addiction and we can undo this mess...it will cause an unholy stink with the self-righteous among you...but you are 90% of the damned problem anyway...remove the junky and the pyramid collapses...legalize, tax, and control drug use and manufacture while you treat addicts and you remove the financial incentive that drives the violence in drugland...the answer is self-evident and has been for decades...the people who control the legislative system just haven't figured out how to turn a profit on the idea yet....if they had market mechanisms would have driven the solution before them long ago...instead people suffer and die because the status quo won't think beyond its own biases...fuck these people.