first principle

“the political intermediaries who are, in all societies, the guarantors of freedom, disappear to make way for a booted and spurred Jehovah who rules over the silent masses or, which comes to the same thing, over masses who shout slogans at the top of their lungs.” “thus he must create guilt in his victims so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt will authorize no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but success…the only value…remained, until the bitter end, success.” “the rebel” albert camus____________________________________

the alleged billionaire and unalloyed doofus in the white house is nothing if not a staggeringly arrogant proponent of a consequentialist viewpoint…success is all that matters…how it is achieved is, at best, a secondary matter with no real room for ethics…acquisition is the goal…what you have matters, not how you got it…anyone who disagrees with that is “stupid a “loser” and a “moron”…and there are no grey areas in that…

an us/them bunker mentality that is endemic to the shouters at his rallies and to the partisan behaviors in congress…

in their descent into bickering along well defined party lines they have ceased to be “ the guarantors of freedom” ( and there is significant doubt in my mind if the congress was ever a guarantor of anything but privilege…there is strong evidence that the change in government engineered by the constitutional convention was rather a coup against the declaration of independence and “the will of the people” by a new aristocratic class ) and become drone representatives of faction with no real desire to be factual or, to the extent humans can be, objective in assessing what is actually going on…since the electoral process is a de facto choice of candidates from the two wings of what is essentially the same party we are left observing events in whoretown with nothing that could be defined as influence by the polity…from the beginning the billionaire portrayed himself as an “outsider” who was going to “drain the swamp”…

this laughable ( and widely accepted ) contention has spurred a host of career politicians to proclaim their outsiderness in a partisan frenzy to pursue the above concept of “success” for as much as they can get…greed as first principle has always had a place in government…it is, I think, the current, blatant display of the fact that has unnerved some of the polity…that it has unnerved a significant portion of the ruling elite is obvious as well as they try to re-cloak the underlying precept of government ( protect and expand wealth at the cost of the rest of society ) which is in danger of screwing up a good gig I n terms that may rival the great depression of disillusionment with capitalism and the hegemonic culture that controls it…”class traitors have emerged in its defense a la fdr in the 1930s…they will be reviled…they will do their best to preserve the status quo while masquerading as being “ for the street”…it is as unsustainable as the economy…it will implode eventually…entropy will have its way and the feedback loop that has allowed it ( read fossil fuels ) will see homo sapiens into “the dustbin of history”…deny what you like…denial is a very human activity and i am deeply familiar with it…reality does not respect it…from rising sea levels to increasing disparity in wealth on a global level to a mass of climate refugees this will not end well.

impeached II and some thoughts on "personal growth"

the puking buddha needed a break...he decommissioned his facebook page and refuses to deal in politics until a week from yesterday...we should respect that...beyond that you find no respect for the subjects at hand here at all...

this woman and her cohort of cadres is planning on withholding the articles of impeachment from the senate in a effort to slow down the senate trial process...the senate majority will be apoplectic...this will end up in court...the government will sue itself...which may serve the same purpose as withholding the information however it will make the whores look all the more partisan and probably harden graham's esculpatory pre judgement across the republican side of the aisle...

meantime the wounded and enraged narcissist will channel stalin and set his sights on "getting even"..after the acquittal...the bloodbath will be instructional about the realities of elite behaviors when they feel threatened from below...

this is just a few of the articles to be found on line that explain to me why it is a "good" thing people hold multiple jobs...a rose colored assortment of pollyanna reasons about "networking" and "personal growth" and "cultivation of skill sets" which is why we should all do this...talking to friends and acquaintances who hold multiple jobs brings to light a different set of reasons... 1) there is a dearth of "full-time" jobs. hours are something less than 40 a week. 2) remuneration for existing jobs is a joke. multiple jobs are necessary as part of the hustle to make ends meet. 3) part-time = no benefits ( a massive corporate savings passed on to ceos and shareholders ) the propgandists in the corporate world work overtime to both engineer your desires and deflate your expectations...fuck these people.

there's nothing in the water...it's just politics

the buddah has plenty to lament...it has been a weird few months and it simply continues to go more sideways as summer draws to a close...things aren't right and i am inclined to think that, while it may not be exactly too late to do something to extricate ourselves from our species and planetary wide predicament, we would rather dither and bicker than act...until, eventually, it will be too late...such are humans...

may saw ten inches of rain in my back yard which probably isn't record setting or the most rainfall ever recorded...or even extraordinary given rainfall in other parts of the planet...still, it had an impact...

in that it rendered the local fields too wet to put in a crop of dense yellow # 2 field corn and so half the fields hereabouts are supporting "native plants" rather than feed stock for industrial food...this is just a local reflection of the climate issue we all are facing across the world ( albeit some more than others...we will be getting to that directly )

there are wild fires burning in siberia...

and the amazon...

and the have been on the uptick over the past year it seems..which may be a bit more of an indication of a crisis than ten inches of rain in my back yard a few months ago...and politicians love a crisis...they can campaign on it...and garner monetary support...and confuse the voters...or scare them..into giving up their sovereignty as individuals in the name of "the greater good"...which somehow always turns out to be to the benefit of the elite who control the hegemonic culture...the problem with climate change is the hegemonic culture cannot readily admit it actually exists and pretty much wishes it would all go away because it is screwing up "business as usual" which has been very profitable for them...a real dilemma for them because the whole climate change thing is pretty scary and you could leverage the rabble into line if it were possible to recognize its existence...so what's a power hungry politician to do? manufacture crises...

trumpy has immigration, nativism, and his useless border wall to stir the yahoos up...

and he keeps trying to jerk china's chain...which may cost him...

and his base among soybean and pork producers..as well as the rest of us if he isn't careful ( and self-absorbed sociopath he is careful isn't in his vocabulary )...

across the pond his political understudy has exacerbated the existing crisis there...

by engineering a prorougement of parliament...

with the help of a senile or complicit ( you choose ) queen in order to prevent parliament from legislating away boris's ability to do things his way and assume the mantle of...

lord protector of all things english...there may be resistance...one can hope there will be...the thrust of politics in "the west" these days seems to be the disenfranchisement of as much of the population ( especially those who don't agree with "business as usual" ) to as great an extent as possible by using scare tactics and outright coercion to achieve that end...a recreation of john locke's desire to not create " too numerous a democracy" and john jay's echoing of that in the federalist papers ( with a supportive "here here" from madison and hamilton )...ever since rome ( if not before ) elites have succeeded in making their interests the "national interest"...they continue to do so...the time for redefinition has arrived.

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 )