contempt?

there may be more concise ways to express a livid contempt of the whores...but not many so attuned to the interweb...happy new years creeps...if i could work out the logistics everyone running for congress in 2014 would lose

the theory of "ruins' value"

"naturally, a new national consciousness could not be awakened by architecture alone. but, when after a long spell of inertia a sense of national grandeur was born anew, the monuments of men's ancestors were the most impressive exhortations. today, for example, mussolini could point to the buildings of the roman empire as symbolizing the heroic spirit of rome. this he could fire his nation with the idea of modern empire. our architectural works should also speak tot he conscience of a future germany centuries from now." albert speer 'inside the third reich"________ speer was the creature of hitler and no mistake...the whole premise of empire is alluring to the hegemonic culture everywhere and is the flaw that seals their eventual fate...i've been re-reading speer as a break from "limits to growth: the 30 year update" and "the energy reader" ( contemplating more than architectural ruins...have a look at tainter's "the collapse of complex societies" while you're at it...change is around the corner ) and i have no sympathy for the nazi's aims or their methodology ( although there seem to be quite a few homegrown folks that do ) but is speer chock full of it or is he on to something? whoretown is a neoclassical mish-mash of architecture designed to show the founders' ( and their immediate successors' ) assumption of empire and also to showcase their overdone classical educations...were they thinking of the ruins the rotunda would leave behind? possibly not but popular culture certainly has latched on to the idea...the statue of liberty in "planet of the apes"...or the capitol itself in "logan's run"...that, however, was indicative of a dystopian present rather than past grandure ( and we all know i love a dystopia...orwellian to the core )so, perhaps, speer's view of the value and use of ruins is totally culture bound just like american popular culture is so dystopian and anti-social...the photos here are from a local ruin...a long abandonded football field built in a 1930s wpa style of ponderous concrete and steel tubing...(why was almost all thirties achitecture so concrete based? was it stalin, hitler, fdr, or was it just the cheapest thing going? )...it is a weird find my son attuned me to and one of many abandoned structures in our home county...i am told that the mecca of urban decay detroit is undergoing a transformation..i am skeptical since mayoral candidates there still seem to be campaigning by promising to tear down more structures than their opponents...but who will even a truncated detroit or a gary or lake station peppered with vacant lots colonized by native plants speak to...and what will it say...grandeur, failure. or, perhaps, a morality play about the costs of overshoot.

saved by boxing day?

"the 2012 holiday season may have been the worst for retailers since the financial crisis, with sales growth far below estimates, forcing many to offer massive post-christmas discounts in hopes of shedding excess inventory." reuters 12-26-2012__________________________ "shifting consumption patterns as the population can no longer pay the price of what it really wants and, instead, purchases what it can afford." one of the signs of economic and resource overshoot from " the limits to growth: the 30 year update"____________ odd that reuters isn't speaking of the "financial crisis" in the past tense...there's a recovery on...right? and all that bullshit about a "fiscal cliff" is just fear-mongering by the liberal media as it vainly represents the interests of an underclass in the face of the obvious darwinian superiority of the fucking one percent...clearly the political class will come to its senses and find a suitable compromise...i mean...the europeans have been doing it for years with the "greek crisis " and that's working out, isn't it? and those poor sods that keep harping away about limits and overshoot...too stupid to live and treasonous in their foolish insistence on limits...the market and its supporting cadre of economic commisars ( read the imf, world bank, and the "chicago school" ) know the real score here...there are no limits and the monetary economy is in no way embedded in the ecosphere...that is just leftist propaganda designed to undermine the confidence of investors..and god only knows what a panic there would do...best not to think about it much less discuss it...they are sensitive as a bug's nuts and as prone to panic as penguins...keep the lid on bad news and drive like hell for the cliff...thelma and louise aren't in congress.

nonrepresentation

"medically, i believe, this manner of thinking is called schizophrenia...closely allied to it is the power of ignoring facts which are obviously unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later. it is especially in our political thinking that such vices flourish. george orwell. "in front of your nose"___________ "a prediction of disaster delivered to an intelligent audience with the capacity to act would, ideally, defeat or falsify itself by inducing action before the calamity." "limits to growth: the thirty year update"_____________________________ well whoever said the whores were intelligent? certainly not me...sluts for money and votes they will pander to their handlers and their true constituents no matter what the outcomes for the "voter" who, after all, is only important on election day...and only then if they vote in the number sufficient to maintain the status quo inside the beltway and not in number large enough to actually force the whores to give their needs and or desires serious debate time...no...an uniformed electorate mollified by sound bites and photo ops with the occasional platitude, crafted by some ivy league bonehead to sound meaningful and sincere without actually saying anything ( where's goebbles when you need him? ), and uncertain of who stands for what ( if anything ) is exactly what the professional political class and the industry that surrounds them want...madison's "interested and overbearing majority" neutralized...we will be plunging over the overhyped "fiscal cliff" shortly and these miserable bastards will ( i fervently hope ) go down with the god damned ship of state...the ever insensitive john boehner is trying to deflect responsibility to the obama camp while the president has said that the american people are more flexible in their outlook on taxes and spending cut than their elected representatives...no shit sherlock...i am inclined to think that the average american has the welfare of their fellow citizen far more at heart than the most populist of whores...we as a people can be as generous as we can be violent ( a peculiar dichotomy but one that is plainly visible )and i believe our better instincts are not supported by the political system which is in the hands of oligarchs who are more interested in insuring that we are played off against one another rather than giving any serious thought to their dubious stewardship...if we are to divest ourselves of one or the other i would say that the system has to be the logical choice...when leadership fails you have to lead yourself...the maxim will become more and more glaringly apparent in the coming years...time to dump this slime into the lake of fire and save ourselves...they have no interest in our welfare...fuck these people.

two weeks to st. thomas' day

blogger seems to use greenwich mean time for the zero point of the day...but where i live it's still december 7th and it's the 153rd anniversary the death of the proto-fugitive and self-proclaimed "pariah" thomas de quincey...critics at the time said his work was "steeped in egotism" because he wrote about his life experiences...they also said he suffered from "diseased introspection"...never one to empower a critic ( and, in this way, akin to henry fielding who said of critics that he would "not plead to their jurisdiction" ) de quincey had eloquent responses...taken to task for his subject matter he replied "...let no man expect to frighten me by a few hard words into embarking...upon desperate adventures of morality"...especially when it was someone else's vision of "morality"...as far as diseased introspection was concerned tom answered..."no man will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least chequer his life with solitude. how much solitude, so much power"...a close part of the wordsworth's circle for years and a husband and father as well as poet, philosopher, writer, newspaper editor and opium addict de quincey was no social paraiah despite the the feelings of isolation that overcome all addicts at times...people liked him and respected his intellect and his expositions on the "pains of opium" will be recognized by anyone who has been chemically dependent...bill burroughs...augusten burroughs...and the exploitative hosts of rehab based reality shows ( cretinous fucks to a man ) all owe tom a debt for his unflinching self-examination

a pen warmed up in hell...

...(stolen from mark twain) is what i would need to do justice to international conspiracy theorists' day 2012...at least the n y times didn't involve itself this year ( have a look at last year's "umbrella man" op-ed piece )and , surprisingly, neither has the national inquirer...this new-found reticence does not extend to much of the rest of the interweb however...the sites are still proliferating in a peculiarly disgusting fashion...from the "refined"..."if you are a sophisticated conspirist you will know that the nonsense in conspiracy theories buries the 'case for conspiracy' under layers of bunk." to the overtly maudlin and border-line nostalgic..."november 22, 1963. dallas, texas. in less than a second america died." any way you cut it is a sad waste of time and energy better spent on addressing the entirely more serious problems facing the species these days ( an economic system in crisis and in need of a serious philosophical readjustment that the hegomonic culture will resist tooth and nail because it will certainly cost them their preeminence in society,,,but the collapse they will engender will do that anyway...read "the limits to growth" sometime or john stewart mill on "stationary economy") like climate change or obamalands' "entropy" ( how, i wonder, will he fight thermodynamics as applied to anthropogenic structures? "everything put together, sooner or later it falls apart ) so let me say again, categorically, i do not care who shot the giddy little hubris filled brahmin...it is irrelevant to all but the unbalanced and those with entirely too much time on their hands...aldous huxley and c s lewis both died on the same day...and while i find lewis unreadable and naive they still were the much greater loss in human terms...where are the conspirists for that?

death on credit ( sorry louis)

)

it's sunday morning people and i was just reviewing the "spam" folders in my email accounts and i have received twenty-seven credit related emails overnight....lending tree wants to give me a loan on my home equity...home improvement stores are offering 0%apr if i get their credit cards...sears wants me to re-open the account i closed after i paid it off...the reverse mortgage industry has obviously targeted me by my age demographic...and every damned fly-by-night credit company and big-time criminal bank ( hear me calling you j p morgan chase? more on those rat bastards in a minute...i mean fuck these people ) wants me to get myself into credit trouble using their instruments...why? i was having a difficult time understanding why the hegemonic culture would risk its collective ass on bundled sub-prime mortgages that they cobbled together into "wonderful investment opportunities" in an act of utter self-delusion until i sat down and gave it some thought...these poor sods from the imf, world bank, the doomed euro zone, obamaland, the fucking imbecile tea party ( get with the times you party of lincoln...these degenerates are and albatross [bloody sea-bird flavor] you have hung around your neck because you think i am stupid...fuck you too ) and all the mavens of the hegemonic culture are addicted to debt because it is the engine of "growth"...and the debt they are addicted to is yours and mine...they don't really care if we have new cars or computers or houses or spiffy clothes or the latest in martha fucking stewart's home decor as long as we have debt....it's the debt that makes them richer and it's the debt that makes the markets happy ( those earnings reports that have so much impact are about how much of your debt you have paid...get cracking...consume damnit...make this the best retail season in living memory and the market will be overjoyed to the world )...i just sent a check off to j p morgan chase to pay off my house because those scum-sucking bastards were basically going to latch on to the insurance money from the fire and keep it...so i will have less debt on december first...i have paid off my vehicle and i will be working on the very last of the credit cards to murder that debt as well...i cannot entirely remove myself from the consumerist utopia...we are embedded in it...it is where we live thanks to the self-same hegemonic culture i have been on about...but i can be a subversive by eliminating as much debt as i humanly can and reducing my consumption through a personal program of austerity and reuse...the goal is to eliminate debt over the next six years and retire to find an avocation instead of a job...i am fed up with consumerism, debt, growth, whore politicians, and criminal bankers...i will remove myself from their foul agenda of personal aggrandizement through the euphemistically labeled process call "the economy"...the gardens and the search for native food crops is only part of the project...it is an act of culture building that they will dislike but not understand...they have no grasp of limits,

four more years

it's the morning after the night before and hoosiers have show unusual political wisdom in rejecting a complete fuckhead who tried to steal a senate seat and confirmed their political foolishness by believing that the rest of the elected candidates are really any better...they were just a bit more tactful in their public statements...so after boatloads of money and enough mud slinging to plaster the walls a foot thick nothing substantive has changed...calls for "unity" all around last night but the senate and house are controlled by warring ideological factions and the gridlock that has characterized what passes for government will continue as posturing and rhetoric replace any attempt at forestalling the entropy that has gripped the late empire...sunk capital investments and self-aggrandizement will prevent any sort of political transition to anything like a steady-state, sustainable, low to no growth economy...the voters have cast their ballots and now they can shut the fuck up and let the whores get on with their "important work " ( to borrow a "tail gunner joe" bit of phraseology )...venality and corrupt practice are dominant...and you have to spend money to make money...as linda mcmahon in what? connecticut? i wonder how vince feels about all that cash she spent trying to land a job that would pay off big...meanwhile the rest of us are on our own...when leadership fails you have to lead yourself...plant a garden in the spring and start to think about how we will create the shadow institutions and practices that will allow us to form communities when these idiots collapse...the disconnect is nearly complete...time to move off in a different direction.

decision day

in the end i see it as a negative choice...the hegemonic culture is not my culture...but go vote lest the slimiest of the cretins gains influence...they already do a multitude of things in my name that infuriate me but this loathsome creep is utterly unacceptable.

political silence broken

all politicians are whores....this is an a priori truth that is indisputable to the extent of being second nature to any really sentient being...i haven't had much to say because it has been such a foul political season with the bullshit " say nothing that pins you to a position" avoidance of commitment though lame rhetoric that i really felt it to be beneath contempt ( and i still yearn to be found in contempt of congress so i can put it on my cv )...but guy fawkes day is a political celebration ( even though the republicans would call it terrorism i would call the powder plot populist outrage and direct political action ) and as good a day as any to break my political silence ( i concluded who my choices were long ago...the fucking thing has only served to positively reinforce my loathing ) and say this mourdock fellow is a complete and utter atavistic throwback to a time when robber barons roamed the earth ( in overt fashion...not hidden behind glitzy pr like today's economic thugs are ) and greasy bags of hundred dollar bills were the currency of political debate...only the pea-brained republican worshipers of wealth will vote for this reeking turd...anyone with an ounce of intellect and with any respect for women will send this clown home tomorrow...where are dr. tarr and professor feather when you need them? flog this creep to the dustbin labeled " hamiltonian "...pull the "you must be fucking joking" lever on november sixth.

co-opt at all costs

"i am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the trade union or goes into labor politics, he becomes quite middle class, whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoise he becomes a bourgeois." from "the road to wigan pier diary" by george orwell 2.6-10.36 ____________________________________________________________________________ george was a sensitive to ironies as he was inequalities...so is this a mechanism of hegemonic culture? anyone who might acquire real influence must be co-opted into the status quo? i have to think so...inclusion as a reward ( or control) for showing initiative or ability that might pose a threat if enough of it was left outside the system...the threat of loss of inclusion ( the control part ), status, economic security for political or philosophical heresy...reinforcement of the elite's orthodoxies...certainly holds true in my union...it's run like a business and leadership has common interest with capital in controlling labor...strikes, slowdowns, a vocal dissent on policy all impede the union's cash flow since their product is industrial peace in contract size chunks...the nature of a union official's duties and obligations push them towards a rapprochement with management and distances them from those purport to represent...an unfortunate circumstance that has turned the "official" labor movement into a special interest...doesn't come as much of a surprise that there weren't many indignant howls of protest from walmart employees when indiana became a right-to-work state...fairly soon unions will be a memory...just like a healthy economy ( healthy for whom? that's a question for another blog...certainly the economic health of wage earners isn't at the top of wall street's agenda...or whoretown's for that matter no matter what those sluts say about "the street"...we're in the middle of another one of joseph schumpeter's foul "contest for votes"...sit back and ask yourself what's changed come next january and make an assessment of whether it's for the better...odds are it won't be for you and me mac...win or lose old mitt will still be doing okay...not so the 23,110,695 "actual unemployed" the u s national debt clock is showing [ as opposed to the politically expediently cooked numbers the bureau of labor statistics arms the whores with]...they will still be putting up with conditions that transfer their wealth to mitt so he can send it offshore...where is the lake of fire? )...then it will be time to rebuild something that is a bit more worker friendly and has the gumption to assert its numbers and subvert the hamiltonian disenfranchisement of the political will of the people.

cultural hegemony = skewed data

in an uncharacteristic and pretty much impulsive act ( which should have the marketers among you salivating since impulse is your god ) i bought a local newspaper today to go along with the n y times that comes to my door ( no i don't trust them either...but it is the paper of record...read it...check out the evening news...epiphany ) after being suitably unimpressed i began to look for crossword puzzles...one happened to be in the "jobs" section...some section...one piece of standard newsprint folded into the standard four pages you get out of one...the front page was consumed by advertizements and an article about the perfect resume and the back page was all adverts...page two was half consumed by an advice column on workplace interactions and the continuation of the resume article and a third of page three was the crossword...that left room for ads or 45 jobs...the "official" unemployed class in lake county indiana is 19,628...you can add ninety percent to that because politicians cook the numbers out of political expedient...not many jobs for all those poor sods...but the dow is soaring ( mostly because a bunch of bankers have sworn on a stack of bibles that they'll save the euro form the intrinsic nationalist loathings that have been on the loose in europe forever and a day...good luck you technocratic morons..irreducible ethnic nationalism will stick a shiv up your ass and smile while doing it )...but that bunch of penguins is no good as an indicator of the real world...they're just betting...and mostly against the rest of us...it's an election year and the whores are going to tell you it's better than it really is and try to sell you on how they can make it better while saying as little of anything substantive about things as they can...they are part of the hegemonic culture with a vested interest in keeping us uniformed about real conditions because if we start to change things they stand to lose wealth and power ( which would be a good thing as far as i can see...but i read a lot and that isn't healthy in the orthodox view of the elite )..so? start thinking critically people and work on the skills and shadow institutions you 'll need to save yourselves when the whole thing implodes ( when? who knows but resource substitution is idiocy and economists are the new alchemists trying to make gold out of base metals all the time not realizing that the ensuing glut would make it more worthless than it is as anything but a fair conductor of electricity...shiny lead...the rest is an abstraction...have a hard look at a natural economy and tell me it will withstand endless extraction...someone should teach these fools some biology)...in the end they are doomed to morph into fascists as they are faced by the threat of substantive change from below...then chicago becomes aleppo...and whoever is presidents turns int bashir al assad

fuck these people

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html?hpw _____________________________ joseph schumpeter hit the nail on the head when he said there isn't any "common good' involved in american politics...only a contest for votes after which the needs and interests of "the voter" become secondary ( if that ) to the interests of those who fund the campaigns...and joe died in 1950 so there isn't much of anything new in this observation...the system has been seriously skewed since at least 1789 and it is humming along the way the framers intended...they couldn't have foreseen the technology or the obscene amount of money that would come to be involved but the basic strategy of marginalizing the political will of any majority would come shining through to them and their ultimate approval...jay madison and that ass hamilton belong at the center of the lake of fire with old bill maclay standing over them pouring on the brimstone...i don't care who is "in the white house... the interests they represent are not my interests and never will be...time to save your own damned self...these jokers don't give a rat's ass what happens to you once you cast a vote.

july 3rd 1790

"these yorkers are the vilest of people. their vices have not the palliation of being manly. they resemble bad schoolboys who are unfortunate at play: they revenge themselves by telling notorious thumpers. even the new england men say that (rufus) king's character is detestable...a perfect canvas for the devil to paint on; a groundwork void of every virtue." the journal of william maclay 1789-1791. july 3, 1790. _________________________________________________________________________ rufus king was a senator from massachucetts and one of those "new england men" who kept the tariff bill bogged down in committee after committee so that their "constituents" could profit by charging their "customers" for a tariff they had yet to have to pay...another of thst "nest of vipers" old bill had to serve with and whom he detested so much for their backroom deals and manipulations of public policy for private profit...as the foul slide into the cesspit of the 2012 presidential election gathers unrelenting speed and generates a massive amount of cash for the correctly placed public relations firms and media outlets let's stop to consider that the system isn't broken...its well oiled hamiltonian/hegemonic culture machinery is humming along just as it was meant to...not that the goebbels of his time could foresee the technological gizmos or the finely tuned and byzantine ethical rationalizations that would develop..but he'd surely recognize the spirit of the system as an old, familiar friend it is...swilling from the trough of public policy has deep roots in america...a storied tradition with the likes of roscoe conklin and william howard taft as leading characters...willing to sell out the "voter" at the drop of a five dollar bill much less a greasy paper sack of wilted hundreds...bath house john and hinky dink called it "honest graft"...but they were small-time operators in a chicago ward with a parochial outlookon "honest" that viewed the everleigh sisters as upright and charles tyson yerkes as a role model......i'm inclined to call it a corrupt system run for corrupt ends ...and if joe, barak, hillary, mitt, or that lame assed quitter from alaska don't agree send them around...i'll be happy to give them an anti-federalist tutorial on madison jay and hamilton that would leave the tea party hacks gasping for breath and stampeeding the exits.

so is this freedom or indoctination

the "nanny" is part of a full page ad in today's new york times attacking bloomberg's proposed ban on "sugary" drinks over 16 fluid ounces, placed by something called consumerfreedom.com ( if you're going to propagandize people why not turn a profit while you're at it? nothing dr. goebbels wouldn't approve of...he wasn't stingy when it came to taking care of himself...why should these guys? )telling me i have a right to induce type 2 diabetes if i want and who is the government to tell me what i can and cannot pound down? the fact that most of those "sugary" drinks are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup ( the drink of the devil ) seems to be eluding ( or is being obfuscated )most of these bozos...fuck the indoctrinators...watch "king corn"...read some of marion nestle's blogs on hfcs...and make your own choice...i've dropped fifty pounds in the last few years mostly by avoiding anything with hfcs in it like the plauge...i don't much like government or its institutions but the empirical evidence tells me that consumerfreedom.com is a scam front for the hfcs syndicate and they can go get bent.

objective journalism and the new gladiators

"in what the bbc called the 'rumble in the rada', parliamentarians tumbled over their desks in the parliament chamber in kiev, the capital, on thursday night, trading blows, tearing shirts, and choking on another as reporters and specatators in the balconies whistled and cheered. one deputy, thrown head first into a chair, turned ans tunbled back into the melee. another flipped over a bannister, feet flailing." new york times 5-26-2012 ____________________________________________________________________________ this is where the political system in this country is seriously lacking...all the heated ( albeit pointless ) rhetoric and personal attacks are only really used during campaigning...after the elections the whores get down to the serious business of defending the interests of their handlers which leaves them pretty much on the same side...difficult to work yourself up into a bludgeoning fury with someone you're on the same page with...the ideological orthodoxy of the congress is a major roadblock to the expansion of political bread and circuses in whoretown...there needs to be a sharper philosophical contrast across the aisle...there hasn't been a good caning in congress since preston brooks beat the daylights out of charles sumner on may 22, 1856...a one hundred and fifty-six year drought...bringing the style of the ufc to the floor of congress would generate a good deal of political interest and strengthen c-spans dismal ratings..a little mayhem could recharge the system without really compromising the special-interests-r-us basis for legislative activity...earmarks, campaign finance reform, and closer oversight by the sec would not be high on the lists of concerns of the new class of "voter" this sort of entertainment would generate and it would vastly expand the donor base for politicians...think of the marketing potential for tee shirts and iron-tipped walking sticks emblazoned with the name of the latest political victor in a debate turned battle royal..there's a goldmine in this people...and if there's one thing that captures a politician's interest it's gold...another opportunity missed because of the growing decadence coupled with a lack of vision and political fortitude that has gripped the nation's capitol...another american tragedy.

ngos, neo-colonialism, and you

this 'attention economics' is a two-way business. while western societies become involved only if old colonial ties are still a factor or if a vital source of materials is affected, the local combatants in protracted wars gamble more and more on triggering mass poverty and refugee flows to spur the west into relief initiatives that can be fed back into the economy of violence." ____________________________________________________________________________ harald welzer. Climate wars:why people will be killed in the twenty-first century. ____________________________________________________________________________ "the manner in which humanitarian aid is given can also influence opportunities for corruption. aid given in the context of humanitarian relief can assume a number of forms. the current predominant model is that of direct project implementation by international agencies. this model has partly developed due to the perceived risks involved in transnational aid resources delivered to national actors...aid recipients have very few powers of sanction in relation to aid providers, while the latter can choose for themselves the level at which their work is subject to scrutiny." ___________________________________________________________________________ corruption in humanitarian aid. transparency international. ___________________________________________________________________________ so...ngos are hip to the "economy of violence" which is simply a variation of extortion in which unscrupulous elites wage war on some minor segment of their population to generate internally displaced persons and a humanitarian crisis that will draw aid agencies like flies and provide them with the means of making a decent living at the expense of the balance of their people...nothing new in that...capital has refined the mechanism to the point that violence is only necessary when they are faced with the threat of substantive change form below...then they simply declare the pursuit of change criminal and build more jails...nations in the southern hemisphere often lack the resources to enact this sort of subtlety and so are forced into the cruder methods discussed above...in an effort to curb this sort of thing ngos have developed a sort of neo-colonial approach well suited to the bureaucrats-in-waiting that those who staff then are..a sort of proxy for the "western societies" that have grown sensitive to the criticisms of their former subject peoples and the need to present an enlightened facade to the world while still finding a way to engage in exploitation..rather than turn the aid supplies over to omar al-bashir, sharif sheikh ahmend, or mahinda rajapaksa, they'll go in and set up their own little satrapy independent of any sort of local input or oversight and distribute aid to whomever they deem worthy of help...a sort of "thin red line" for the twenty-first century holding the carrot of humanitarian aid instead of the traditional musket ( this, of course, is still available for use if the area contains a resource that is "vital" or if it is in a position to impede access to said resource...these, rather than the conservative bugbear of "nation building" or the equally fatuous contention of "spreading democratic ideals", have been the driving force behind the imperial wars of the last decade...the empire is finding its extended borders more and more difficult to defend and the imminent financial collapse won't be simplifying the task of maintaining the empire's power base...the "american century" is truly over...reality simply eludes the knee-jerk reaction of the elite...give it time ) maintaining an old tradition of subjugation to the colonial master's needs with new methods...there may have been a time when i felt that the good groups like amnesty international and oxfam did outweighed my misgivings about, among other things , how much of my donation they applied to their ostensible "work" and how much they used to solicit further donations from me and anyone else that found their way onto their mailing lists...that view has fled screaming into the night...pretty soon oxfam will be a pentagon sub-contractor.

pundit plays catch-up

"all these tensions over land, water and food are telling us something. the arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population, and climate stresses as well." thomas l friedman. n y times 4-8-2012 ____________________________________________________________________________ "in 'revolution and rebellion in the early modern world' university of california sociologist jack goldstone makes an excellent case for how the english revolution of 1640, the french revolution of 1789, the various revolutions in central europe in 1848, the jelali revolts in the ottoman empire, and rebellions in imperial china all emerged from the inability of regimes to deal with problems arising from sustained population growth and natural resource depletion." robert d kaplan. "the ends of the earth: a journey to the frontiers of anarchy." 1996. p.117 ____________________________________________________________________________ "elements of modernization and judicial dispute resolution, which were introduced in more peaceful times thirty or so years ago, swept away traditional strategies for problem solving or reconciliation without establishing new or functioning forms of regulation." harald welzer. "climate wars: why people will be killed in the 21st century" 2012 p.59 ___________________________________________________________________________ looks like old tom finally got around to reading bob's 1996 tome on the subject of the connection between resource depeletion and conflict...maybe he picked up a copy of the "post-carbon reader" or, better yet, read some richard heinberg...this bozo has been stumping for the globalitarian elite for decades folks and his sudden conversion is suspect in my eyes...it is the west's concept of "progress" that destroyed the traditional cultures in much of the world to benefit an economic elite that could then exploit the vacuum left behind as the displaced fled to urban slums ( see mike davis's book "planet of slums" for a detailed account of the destruction and subsequent "horizontal" proliferation of unholy slums around cities like lima and lagos ) and became cheap labor and fodder for anything you can do with expendable humans...the egyptians had a traditional culture that farmed the nile river valley for millenia tapping into the yearly deposit of rich silt delivered by the annual nile flood until old gamel dammed it up at aswan...now the delta is eroding and sinking...and how much chemical fertilizer do egyptian farmers now use and who sells it to them? seem my point? there's no whore like a reformed whore and if this isn't some sort of scam to increase the leverage of tom's economically well placed handlers i eat my hat with no salt...someone needs to kick tom in the nuts if for nothing other than being so far behind the curve on something i have been reading about for decades...maybe we could get bob kaplan or thomas homer-dixon to tutor the poor fool and get him up to speed...or get the n y times to banish him to the globe or the national enquirer where he belongs.

weimar 2.0?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "the u.s. government and the federal reserve have committed the system to its ultimate insolvency through the easy politics of a bottomless pocketbook, the service of big-moneyed special interests, gross mismanagement, and a deliberate and ongoing effort to debase the u.s. currency. yet the particularly egregious fiscal and monetary responses to economic and solvency crises of the past five years have exacerbated the governments solvency issues, bringing the great financial tempest close enough to making landfall that the hairs on the backs of investors' necks should be standing on end." http://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-414-hyperinflation-special-report-2012 _______________________________________________________________________ weimar? why not? the inter-war german republic was many things but it was never boring...might be good to unhinge the social moorings and see what we're really made of...the late republic is looking a little conservative to me and a swift kick to he nuts of social complacency might loosen things up...george grosz liked to take his old army rifle up on the rooftop of his berlin studio and "shoot pigeons...and other things"...blow off a few rounds to let off steam after a day of producing the "degenerate art" that joe geobbles said he hated but stashed in the bunker off whilhelm strasse when old herman goering wasn't looking ....a fine response to stress that hasn't lost its appeal in the ensuing decades...many prominent men are devotees of the pastime...dick cheney has been particularly fond of pounding back a few beers and letting the buckshot fly...here's hoping his health is on the mend and he can become a public danger again soon...the germans ( with the help of dr. hjalmar horace greely schacht[really that was his name...no kidding] one of the fraternity of economists )hyper-inflated their currency to write off a bunch of reparations slapped on them by the victorious allies in the first world war...so what if it led to all the bad noise after 1933? it got them off the hook didn't it? so how much do we owe the chinese? difficult economic times call for strong leadership and the krauts were chock full of omniscient leaders...why can't the richest and most powerful nation since rome do the same? some will doubtlessly call me overly negative, if not totally paranoid...i mean the economy is better, right? consumer spending picked up in february according to recently released government figures...all you had t do was go to the gas staion to scrounge some fuel to understand why...i'll be willing to bet march's numbers show some gains too, but i can't help but wonder exactly who it is that's doing the gaining...it's a fuzzy picture with a lot of politically expedient cooked numbers that reflect the growing pressures of an election year..the pollyannas among you will call me malthusian but old ozzie spengler had their number around a hundred years ago...there is no such thing as paranoia.

orwell, sapir/whorf, and you

"in these passages whorf sets forth a double principle: the principle of linguistic determination, namely, that the way one thinks is determined by the language one speaks, and the principle of linguistic relativity, that differences among languages must therefore be reflected in the differences in the worldviews of their speakers." from "language, culture, and society: an introduction to linguistic anthropology" by zdenek salzmann ____________________________________________________________________________ "the purpose of newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. it was intended that when newspeak had been adopted once and for all and oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought, that is a thought diverging from the principles of ingsoc, should be literally unthinkable...newspaek was designed not to extend, but to diminish the range of thought..." from "appendix: the principles of newspeak" from "1984" by george orwell. ____________________________________________________________________________ eric blair was a writer, and as such it is understandable that he was obsessed by language...you can see it in his essays like "the lion and the unicorn" or "cigarettes or books"...but it really comes out when he writes about the unfortunate uses language is put to when it it twisted and distorted by politicians ( read whores ) to whatever unsavory antics they were up to...have a look at " the prevention of literature" or "politics and the english language" and you'll see what i mean...newspeak was thoroughly rooted in linguistic determinism ( see pinker or chomsky for a rebuttal of linguistic determinism...or e.o. wilson of you want whole-hog socio-biology)and although whorf was dead by the time orwell wrote 1984 he still was a contemporary and it's possible that george had read some of his writings...if he did it scared the crap out of him almost as much as james burnham did,a nd being the lover of language that he was george just had to turn its mutilation ( and so a strong sapir/whorf ) into a horror story with a touch of stalinist style cant and a propensity for sudden outbreaks of "non-person" that evoked a "memory hole" as stalin's cronies disappeared from old photos one by one...sapir/whorf is a favorite of politicians ( although the ignorant fucks probably would know what the sapir/whorf hypothesis was if it bit them on the ass )...they want to believe that we can't communicate with one another...share stories, hopes, disappointments...address common problems in an equitable way...recognize limits and act responsibly...have a culture...my plan is to disappoint them.

culture

my great grandparents family names are cooper, edwards, hall, mccolly, schlagda, beno, primic, and czomplak...eastern and western europe have come home to roost in me and mine ( my kids have the added flavor of names like sowa and yacko added to their gene pool)today would be my carpatho-rusyn granny's one hundred and twenty first birthday ( this is anna czomplak we're talking about ) this year is also the centennial of her arrival here from what was the austro-hungarian empire when she immigrated...she was an atypical granny on wilson street and i have come to the conclusion that it was because she brought a culture with her to indiana ( not that the old folks on the other side of the family did not have something of a nineteenth century air to them...the bulk of my grandparent's generation were born in the later nineteenth century [granny was twenty-one in 1912] and they had a much more relaxed view of time as i recall...they really did time things with a calendar...i miss that sometimes )she came form a small village called nizhne chabine ( which means "near chabine"..a podunk wide spot in the road...cousins tell me that nizhne chabine exists no more...chabine has subsumed the nearness and it part of the town now)and parts of the village came along...easter eggs for instance...for weeks before orthodox ( "real" in her eyes...just like our christmas, easter was a false festival..off by several weeks form the true date)easter shed gather peels form yellow onions in a paper bag and on an auspicious day she's put them in a pot of water with some salt and vinegar and boil them up for dye (she sneered at our paas)...she'd heat some bee's wax up in a pie tin on the stove and with a straight pin stuck in an old crow cork she'd make designs on raw eggs with the wax...then she'd dip ( not hard boil) the eggs in the dye...the resultant designs all had some significance in her hagiography...but she'd end up using the eggs anyway...what culture i possess i gained form granny in the years she lived with us...i like the folks form the old country i knew...mostly gentle people who seemed a bit lost at times in an endearing way...their kids turned their back on the "old country" for the most part ( although my mom still speaks carpatho-rusyn )...perhaps that was part of the loss...happy birthday granny.

perception

"...nearly all academic studies, models, and prognoses regarding the phenomena and consequences of climate change have been in the natural sciences. in the social and cultural sciences, it is exactly as if such things as social breakdown, resource conflict, mass migration, safety threats, widespread fears, radicalization and militarized or violence-governed economies did not belong to their sphere of competence." "in reality there are billions of subjects from different cultural backgrounds, endowed with highly diverse economic opportunities and political resources, who act within a number of complex life communities. no socially identifiable 'we' links together a landless chinese farm laborer and the chairman of a multinational energy corporation; they inhabit completely different social worlds, each with its particular demands, and, above all, its particular rationality...the use of 'we' assumes a collective perception of reality that does not exist, even in relation to global problems such as climate change." harald welzer. "climate wars:why people will be killed in the 21st century." ____________________________________________________________________________ old harald has a point about the dearth of understanding of how different we are and how cultural world view will dictate the general thrust, if not the specifics of perception of what is a problem and how to deal with it...and i don't see a lot of academic work on the subject in social sciences ( yes i have looked...i am a university student with some resources at hand and access to people smarter than me...or, at least, better educated and with a somewhat different viewpoint ) beyond what thomas homer-dixon has done at the university of toronto on resource conflict...and until someone digs down and does the work ( and then there's the problem of getting people to pay attention to the findings ) to find some sort of universals that will generate some sort of consensus on what we face as a species we will continue to get deeply conservative assessments of the problem and the attendant deferrals of responsibility that are currently a staple in government and corporate thought on the matter...nascar and the national corn growers' association will continue to trumpet the benefits ( without the negative impacts like food prices or eroie ) of ethanol, american ingenuity, and horsepower and jared diamond, or worse yet al gore, will be telling us that we should address the issue by driving less and taking cold showers as of that will make any sort of difference when china brings another coal-fired generating plant on line every week...there doesn't seem to be a 'we'...just an 'us' and 'them'...we'd better get off our dead asses and find a way to bridge the gap...time to plant trees and learn to eat in season.

water, fossil or otherwise...

"corn typically needs about 24 inches of water, either precipitation or applied, during the growing season; if that yields 220 bushels/acre of corn, the 'depth' of the EtOh (ethanol) produced is 0.022". if we assume just 12" of water was applied to supplement rain the ratio of water/EtOh is 5553:1. when you see a railroad car filled with ethanol go by. think of the five trains of water, each with 110cars, hauling the water necessary to produce one tank car of ethanol." charles a. washburn ........................ so...are biofuels going to save your corvette's fuel injected ass? no...so many problem with the national corn growers' association view of the world that it is difficult to know where to begin...from the overdraft of the ogallala aquifer to grow all that "corn husker" corn in nebraska to the eroei on biofuels the complications are staggering...like that mickey d's burger, fries and coke you bolted down at lunch, biofuel takes an enormous amount of water to produce, this doesn't even touch on the petro-chemical inputs in the form of fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and fuel for machinery that biofuel production consumes...setting aside the bug and weed killers and plant food ( in the form of haber-bosch process anhydrous ammonia which uses natural gas as feedstock...remind me to tell you the fritz haber story sometime...ironic doesn't quite cover it...but it's the best i can do at the moment) there's the fuel farm machinery consumes...as i write this oil is trading at $109.62 a barrel...not a world's record ( yet ) but With all the noise about iran and the closing the straits of hormuz and placing sanctions on the purchase of iranian oil ( which just leaves more for china and india ) it will go as high as the speculators can drive it...anyway...you get the idea...oil as a resource is facing a limited and increasingly expensive future ( no arguments about hubbert's peak and when it is..or was...in this post anyway ) so what's going to replace it as fuel in farm machinery? biofuels?...if you start to use a fuels a s water prohibitive as ethanol to produce ethanol you could have a problem...not to mention the fact that ethanol is only one quarter as efficient as petroleum based fuels so you may end up expending more energy to make ethanol than it returns (eroei returns to bite techno optimists on the ass again)...there's always a catch...water...fuel...fertilizer...malthus hasn't cashed his check yet...time to dust off wes jackson's "new roots for agriculture" and steve brush's "farmer's bounty"...buffalobird woman could give you some useful ideas about feeding yourself too.

fossil water

http://www.great-lakes.net/humanhealth/drink/index.html

i live at the southern end of a fresh water inland sea that impacts many things from the climate to the water i put on my gardens when it doesn't rain in july...if you go for a stroll along the shore it seems like an infinite supply...and there is a lot of water there...lake erie has 118 cubic miles of water...lake huron 850...lake 1,180...lake onatrio 393...and lake superior has 3,00cubic miles of water...that's 5,533 cubic miles of water in the basin...lots of coffee, tea, or icewater...but it's not limitless...most of it is fossil water left over from the last ice age and the system recharges at only about one percent ( 53 cubic miles )...a cubic mile holds about 110 trillion gallons which makes the total amount seem even more astronomical...but then consider that chicago alone uses a billion gallons a day, and because the chicago river's flow was reversed it drains another 2.1 billion gallons out of the system every day and things focus in a bit better...the 26 million people that rely on the great lakes for drinking water withdraw around 328.5 billion gallons a year...this doesn't include industrial and agricultural use but even with those figures added in i assume the usage is well within the 53 cubic mile recharge rate...as climate change exacerbates water crises like the one in the texas town that the water truck is making a delivery to i have to wonder how long the usage will stay within those parameters...will the entrepreneurial spirit of the market treat a finite resource as an expendable asset the way economists have taught them to do so far with all the other finite resources? my bet is greed will trump wisdom every time and the resource managers will create a large-scale ecological mess in one area ( have a look at the water transfer schemes in china...there's a study in desperation...how many yuan per cubic mile of great lakes water? ) in a effort to offset one in other places ( generating a tidy profit for the risk takers who engineer the whole deal...rightful profits and all that...i wonder who will become the edward trevelyan of the water famine? the pompous and rank conciliator of greed to want ) scoff if you like....malthus hasn't been proven wrong yet...there's still data to collect.

one big union

there are those who argue, and i am inclined to agree, that organized labor's real troubles began when they were officially recognized in 1935 when fdr signed the wagner act and the venue for expression for worker discontent was removed from the street, sit down strike, and picket line and dropped into the realm of legislation, courts, and injunctions where it has been pummeled by the agents of a reactionary elite determined to retain its economic and political advantage ever since...the issues widened in the post world war two era when unions bought into the social contract that gave workers a continuously rising standard of living in return for staying out of politics AS WORKERS, and instead relying on mostly the democrats for their "seat at the table'...as the post-war economic dominance of the united states faded the elites began to roll back the economic perks of the contract and, unfortunately for labor, they discovered too late that the democrats were actually the liberal wing of the ruling elite and that their liberalism ended when the pipeline of wealth was threatened...labor bet on a false ally...as labor's political influence eroded the leadership continued to focus on parochial issues of economic, as opposed to political, gain for its membership...mostly because the unions had become businesses...contratcs-r-us...dispensing industrial peace in contract sized bites...this this focus on money created a unionized economic elite disconnected from the problems of the balance of workers...the "official" labor movement had become a small scale ( compared with corporate interests ) special interest group lobbying legislatures for its membership and not the "workers" it claimed to represent...isolated by its small size and its distance form public good will it has been subjected to increasing attack and constriction of the rules governing how it can operate...today the whores and slumlords in indianapolis passed a "right to work" law in an effort to put the final nail in organized labor's coffin..okay...it wasn't doing much good anyway...perhaps now workers will begin to realize the need to participate in politics as WORKERS rather than relying on an inadequate and unreliable proxy...tear it down and we can rebuild a mass movement and reclaim some turf from the grassroots up.

unpaid ( corvee?) labor

it snowed a bit here yesterday and i just came in from about an hour's worth of work clearing the walks, digging out the driveway , and uncovering my son's car...the municipality did what passes for a fair job of plowing last night but they still left me with some work if i didn't want to rip the exhausts off the vehicles...admittedly the fact that my son's car was parked on the street had something to do with the volume of snow i had to move...but still it had to be done if, for instance, i wanted my mail delivered...this is a yearly process since there have always been more vehicles than driveway space here ( what's that say about ecological footprints? i did, however, use a shovel to clear the snow...no more mechanical crap than necessary...a sort of physical carbon offset...along with my perennial's root systems [but that's a different blog]...and i have driven only 742 miles since i changed the oil in my pickup on december first...a 14.8 mile a day average...not a complete sinner )as i was removing the pile the city left me i began to ponder on unpaid labor here in bitch daniels' state of emergency...services that the state used to provide have been offloaded onto the public wherever possible...corners cut...and bureaucratic thinking ( if not the actual size of the bureaucracy ) has taken root with a vengance...have a go at renewing a driver's license...or consider that the state used to print and mail tax forms but ( unless you are filing the simplistic form )you have to expend your paper and ink to print the forms and tax schedules yourself...and that's just the state...how much of what i do in what is commonly called "spare time" is relevant to my direct needs and desires and how much of it supports the government or economic entities ( read corporate interests)? i mean nipsco and the criminals at j p morgan chase represent on-line bill paying as a convenience but the reality is i have to do the legwork to establish the links that actually save those entities hard cold cash...and i have to do it monthly...is that convenience for me or for nipsco? there's more to this than appears on the surface and it's something i will be thinking about as i go about my daily routine...how much unpaid labor in support of someone or something else's interests have i been enculturated to take on a s an unconscious matter of course? it bears looking into.

conventional wisdom

"as societies modernize and become richer, their networks become more complex, interconnected, and faster. they...increase the number of links among the nodes, and they boost the speed at which stuff moves from node to node along the links...the first cost of greater connectivity is that damage or a shock in one part of the system- the failure of a machine, the release of a computer virus, or a local financial crisis can cascade farther and faster to other parts of the system."
"the upside of down: catastrophe, creativity, and the renewal of civilization" thomas homer-dixon


"yet disaster researcher benjamin mcluckie hypothesized ( in 1977 ) that 'the higher the societies level of technological development, the more vulnerable it would be.' that is because people in industrialized countries live in major population centers and rely on sophisticated technologies, increasing their vulnerability to a large scale collapse of interlocking systems of transportation, communication, water-supply, and food distribution."
"peak everything: waking up to a century of declines." richard heinberg

http://www.usdebtclock.org/energy.html

so collectively the world is using more energy than energy producers are supplying by hundreds of thousands of btu's...the energy that drives the "sophisticated technologies" and powers the inter-connectivity of "advanced" societies...oil is up to $101 a barrel last time i looked...the iranians are making noise ( and it's probably just noise...they have significant energy contracts with the chinese and that is a relationship they most likely don't want to screw up)...and the stock market has started the new year as schizoid as it ended the last...economists still insist on reducing basic resources ( like energy, food, water, etc.) to terms of dollars so they appear to be interchangeable for purposes of economic rationalizations of greed and exploitation of anything that promises to turn a profit ( always a shot-term activity...profit is about what's going on now ) no matter what future costs that exploitation may incur... since the reality is that dollars are an abstract representation of real things and basic resources are not fungible anything an economist says should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism...like all professionals they are not as knowledgeable as they would care for you to believe...full of human frailties and as readily mistaken in their beliefs as anyone...there are a lot of humans out there and all of them are making decisions on a daily basis...billions of variables and , no doubt, millions of loose cannons, creating a world so vastly complicated that even the most "educated" amongst us can have only the most general idea of what's really going on...since politicians of substantially inferior intellect rely on the "educated" to brief them on issues that they should at all costs avoid discussing in any election cycle the cachet of leadership ability that these bozos are trying so desperately to portray themselves as possessing in quantities that should entitle them to roles of leadership is, in my mind, a matter so deeply shrouded in doubt as to render politics absurd...in the end they and the "educated" that serve as their handlers have a vested interest in portraying a return to "normal" as a viable possibility...that a host of programs have failed ( despite the questionable evidence of statistics cooked as a political expedient ) should be an indication of their inability to wrap their pea brains around the enormity of the dilemma the last two hundred years or so of industrialization have been building towards...i will vote in 2012..i always do because it makes them nervous when larger than usual number of people vote and i can't think of a class of people that deserves to be more uncomfortable than politicians...i would encourage you to do so as well if for no other reason than that...then stop and think a bit about how you might be able to find ways in your locality to help yourselves and your neighbors...when leadership fails ( and they have in manifold ways) you have to lead yourselves.

a nest of vipers

"here an observation forces itself upon me: that, in general, the further any measure is carried from the people, the less their interests are attended to."
"the journal of william maclay 1789-1791" 23 may 1789

twenty-nine days into the first congress and already it was becoming clear that "his littleness" and "that damned ass hamilton" had created a government by and for special interests that had no reason to take the interests of the public at large into account to justify its existence...what sparked this epiphany in my good friend bill was the "debate" over a tariff bill that was intended to afford the new federal government some income...its passage was being delayed by "those new england men" who had some reservations about the tariff proposed for molasses...john lawrence, elbridge gerry, and some guy bill only identifies as "williams form baltimore" were holding up the bill's final presentation to congress, allegedly hammering out a compromise between the house and senate versions...but, significantly, many of the proposed tariff rates had been leaked to the mercantile class and, " the merchants have already added the amount of the duties to the price of goods. in this point of view the impost is levied, but not a farthing goes to the treasury of the united states; and all the difference between the state duties levied and the proposed duties is clear gain to the merchants...and the devil of it is that the sum will actually be paid by the consumers."[entry for 21 may 1789]...so with the connivance of some allies in congress the mercantile class in the fledgling united states was bilking consumers out of ready cash for a tariff they were not yet obligated to pay...that folks is in the true spirit of the constitution and a pretty good example of the decision-making process over issues that impact them being taken out of the hands of the public at large and decided in a venue where they have little control and whose decisions they are forced to live with as fact...the subversion of "the interested and overbearing majority" made plain and a good indication of why things will never change with the constitution in force...old bill loathed these bastards and i can see why...fuck these people and all their generations