at the very point of decadence

“we select a single bit of ground as the natural center of the historical system, and make it the central sun. from it all events of history receive their real light; from it their importance is judged in perspective.”---ozzie Spengler. decline of the west___________ ozzie tells us all history is a matter of perspective…subjective…you cannot take the historian out of the history and the holy grail of historians, primary sources, are usually written by someone who was involved in the described events…someone with a perspective…and, quite possibly , an agenda…objectivity in history is a much rarer commodity than historians would lead you to believe…why you can find a “factual history” to support any viewpoint…all history is revisionist too…as wolgang shivelbusch rightly points out, the losers never go away…they lay low and retrench…harden attitudes…mythologize explanations for failure…and as time goes on begin to revise history…hans nossack started the revision of the bombing war in euurope..but he wrote in german and was not published in English until recently…w.g.sebald was among the first to point out that not everyone killed in an air raid in Germany was a nazi and jorg friedrich has written a damning portrait of churchill and “bomber” harris as perpetrators of terrorist tactics in pursuit of the defeat of a no less criminal regime…both sides deliberately targeted civilian populations in the name of some greater good…real or imagined…the upshot is everyone in a war commits war crimes…the winners just don’t go to trial…there have been winners and losers here too…politically and economically and they haven’t disappeared either…the north/south disconnect is the most obvious one…and the one the most ink and actual blood has been spilled over…and the losers there did not disappear…even though there is a remarkable movement afoot to sanitize history and remove all traces of the short lived southern nation hood...orwell’s “memory hole” alive and still in the never ending business of revision…there are other , less clear, divisions around…some years ago there was a book by joel garreau titled the nine nations of north America…which isn’t a bad starting point but I sat down with a relief map of the united states and a red pen and came up with fourteen…and now that California is set to vote on whether or not to divide itself into the fifty-first and second states in November ozzie’s view that there is a life cycle to nations and that they all decline and expire may seem to be born out…in these trumpist times ( when the republican national committee is demanding loyalty oaths to der fur hair ) the social connection that is nationhood seems to be unplugging itself…the disconnect is palpable, the poles are moving farther apart, and there seems to be a conscious effort to distort and muddy the waters…no firm grip on events…so we stumble from seizure to seizure seeming to accept what orwell called “catastrophic gradualism” ...things relentlessly and unstoppably moving from bad to worse in increments…orwell argued against that acceptance and Isaiah berlin maintained there was no “historical inevitability” in direct opposition to ozzie…i would probably agree with the two former over the latter…but how to tell when no one has the vaguest idea of who is in possession of the facts, who is distorting, and who just doesn’t know…well…no one does…not even those who purport to know…so…act where you can on what you see around you…help people who obviously need it…say something when you see an injustice…and get off your dead ass and vote ( where and when the powers that be allow it …i vote in every election so I am not purged )..an individual vote doesn’t really mean much…in general my votes go to losers anyway… the point is the politicians among us hate it when a lot of people vote…it makes things a lot less predictable and those rat fucks depend on our habitual apathy ( or voting patterns ) to get their way…no you won’t change the world…or maybe even stop califronia from self-destructing…you might make some gop senator think twice before declaring allegiance to the fur hair prinzip…there is no inevitable….( by the by…hitler stole the whole deal from georg von schonerer…there is no originality in politics...again...just a dependence on the habitual behaviors of the polity )

swill bucket

"advertising is the sound of a stick in a swill bucket."-george orwell_____________________i have always admired orwell's take on many things...this being one of them...advertizing is rank manipulation and i know it when i see it...today's new york times is a disappointing two pounds nine and three-quarters ounces in weight...one presumes this will pick up a bit as the "false and commercial festival" gathers inertia...we will be delving into that...forewarned is forearmed...i was curious to see what the cost of all this manipulation was so i went to the n y times advertizing web site and did ab it of research...i looked at full page ads only...mostly because i didn't want to sped the time screwing around counting half and quarter page ads...so the totals for advertizing revenues herein are woefully incomplete...forewarned is forearmed...full page ads in the newspaper itself range in price by section and color/black and white...$214,723 buys you a four color full-page ad in the front section or the business section $178,633 for a black and white..the fine arts section brings up the tail end $107,970 for color and $71,870 for black and white...perhaps out of deference for starving artists...so the three full page beauties pictured fetched the nyt $644,199...but it is the magazines that drive the business and no mistake...full page color in either of the magazines ( the standard weekly or the periodical style ) runs $107,075 and black and white $73,420...today's magazines contain seventy-four full page color ads and six black and white for a total full page income of $8,364,243...and combined with the three full page ads pictured we're up to $9,008,442...add in half page, quarter page column, half column and subscriptions and you can see that there is cash flow here and, despite the whining from the print media about digital, profit as well i'm thinking...clearly news is a secondary part of this and i don't doubt that it is slanted to placate the advertiser's world views...the truth is a flexible thing...we all find different versions..but this alone is valid reason to trust no media. 7:52 p.m. 11-2-2014 just a note to say that my original figures were off...blame age...they have been adjusted downward...that's still no excuse for gross manipulation or gross amounts of cash...it's just an adjustment.