taxes, whore politicians, and contingency

my not going to the court house in the county seat ( "what will happen if this does not happen"...begins to sound like a descartes square ) today would have been contingent on several events occurring which did not...first i would not have gone if i could have paid my property tax on line...unfortunately when i filled out the "payment" page with all the rquisite details such as routing number, account number, address, email, phone number and clicked on continue to go to the confirmation page nothing happened...same with a debit/credit card...technological failure...second...i could have mailed it ( i have eighteen days left to pay in ) if i trusted the post office...however since just yesterday i received mail addressed to someone in a different city i had no faith in their abilities...third...there was a list of banks that would accept my payment on the bill...i did not want to hassle with finding directions to branches of unfamiliar banks and trust issues cropped up here yet again...so i got in my vehicle and drove to the county seat...the treasurer's office is in "building A" in the complex which is fine except there were large signs on the windows stating "entrance sr-1 is closed ( this being the door to "building A" ) the public should use entrance sr-2 " ( why the "sr" designation eludes me ) which was a nuisance but what to do...unfortunately "entrance sr-2" is the entrance to the building with the courtrooms so i had to empty my pockets in a plastic tray and walk through a metal detector which my metal belt buckle and the rivets in my jeans set off so i had to be frisked and scanned again with a hand-held scanner ( " boy you sure got a lot of metal buttons in here"...no they're rivets but that is beside the point )...after that adventure i had to walk down the hallway connecting the buildings...which was festooned with signs saying "detour for entance sr-1" and walk up the stairs ( the deputy at the door said i should "take the elevator" so i defied authority ) to the treasurer's office which was surprisingly empty so that transaction was quick if not painless...coincidentally enough early voting was set up just outside the treasurer's...

so i voted against that orange haired bozo...which won't actually matter in this yahoo state however i voted my opinion of that clown officially...whore politicans ( from the county level grifters on up ) are all whores...some are simply less vile than others

antness

so i am one of doubtlessly a significant number of people to receive this...

email informing me that there are changes coming to the way i log into my social security account and i had best get on with conforming my account with said changes or i won't have access and then there will be extensive paperwork just to prove i am me so we can fix this...they seem unable to leave things be...why did a user name and password on one page need to be shifted to another? one possibility is that one subset of bloated bureaucrats had to find a way to justify their existence and making changes to "streamline the process" into a more "efficient interface" was just the ticket...or...they could simply be intensifying what the dutch writer geert mak calls "antness"...the feeling of being small in the face of institutional archetecture...both physical and in the processes involved in maintaining your identity "inside"...change keeps people off balance and provides them with something to occupy their attention and thoughts...an effort to prevent them from thinking about why we should need to pander to a bureaucracy and their top down imperatives to change the way things are done for instance...either way, my thoughts are this is not likely to improve until the entire edifice collapses from its own weight

political discourse 101 summer session 2024

i saw any number of these flying from pick-up trucks on the fourth of july...not surprising since the next county over in this trupy state is a crypto-fascist enclave of white rural rage...amazon sells them at a reasonable price so even the land poor can pick one up to vent their spleen at everyone in eyeshot...and, given the condition of some pick-ups, earshot...

given that capitalism is consequentialist, amazon sells these as well...it's what old jeff has not how he got it that matters...a system lockean to the bone that focuses on property not ethics...i cannot truthfully say i have seen one of these in the flesh even though there are pockets of anti trump voters dotted around the environs...i also notice that they are three dollars more in price...somewhat unfair pricing as one correspondent to this blog has pointed out...another has pointed out that the pricing may reflect that the socio-economic status of those who might consider flying a "fuck trump" flag would likely be of a higher standing and so could be afforded...both sensible positions...they do, however, leave out the sacred economic principle of supply and demand...the greater the demand the higher the cost because the "good" is in scarcer supply...there may be more "fuck trump" minded people about than white rural rage is taking into consideration...or, conversely, old jeff is trying to discourage purchase by jacking up the price and giving us a glimpse of his political position in 2024...either way, political discourse has sunk to a rather low level in my experience...politics is always emotional and fear based to whip up the mob ( politicians love a rally because of group-think [ think "two minutes hate" ] and the attendant lack of thought that they entail...in the documentary "confessions of a hitler youth" the subject discusses being at a party rally where hitler spoke...at one point the crowed rose to its feet screaming "heil hitler" in which the protagonist joined and then said, after the noise had died down, that he truned to his neighbor and asked "what did he say?" politicans on both sides of the aisle are pure slime...past, present, and future ) so it's no surprise people aren't really thinking...takes too much work...and the incessant drone of political falsehoods alienate anyone who might...fuck these people.

2025

2025 i have listed at least three distinct groups that likely see donny trump as a vehicle to furthering their agendas...these would be people of wealth...religious fundamentalist/theocrats...and white nationalists ( aka racists )… wealth wealth does not want to be taxed...wealth wants more since wealth is never satisfied...wealth wants it all and as a result debt will become more central to the national political agenda than it already is...in an effort to reduce as much of the population to a state of debt penury, unable to do more than survive and service the interest on the debt while never paying down the principle i can see a sharp reduction, if not the outright elimination, of social security benefits ( which are NOT an entitlement...i have paid for them all my working life and continue i pay into the fund while collecting benefits...politicians, of course, see a different reality ) rendering the aged submerged in debt to survive... credit card interest rates are already usurious yet one could see there being no legal limit set on where they may raise to...economic life may become one national payday loan store to a greater extent than it already is… fundamentalist/theocracy oklahoma seem to be leading the way here as the bible is introduced into public schools blurring a constitutional separation of church and state which is the agenda of any number of sects as a start towards some sort of compulsory church membership or, possibly if there is some residual tolerance ( although to be tolerant is to be lukewarm ) a non-attendance tax melded into say the income tax like the wonder of obamacare leading to something akin to Edinburgh in the 1750’s...”the Sabbath was a day in which every moment was under surveillance. Work, the smallest recreation, ‘vaguing’ in the High Street or on the Castle esplanade, all invited punishment from Kirk-session or a fine from the magistrates. ‘Seizers” patrolled the streets during sermon-time to ensure attendance...or patrolled the streets in the evening, pursuing suspicious passers-by down the steep, dark wynds...visitors from England were crushed by the gloom of the Edinburgh Sunday.” (Crowded With Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment. James Buchan p. 60)...something to look forward to and, no doubt, something dreamed of by theocratic wannabes….in my estimation freedom of religion would include freedom from religion...or, at least, organized religion...i do not need some cleric to tell me i am part of cycles larger than myself...all i need to do is look at the sky at night...i can achieve that without allowing someone to remove my existence from the here and now to some imagined eternity...i will live my life in the present, thank you without the benefit of clergy or slimy televangelist impostures. racists Native-n. A person born in a place; a person connected to a place by birth whether subsequently a resident there or not. b. A local resident of a place. c. One of the original or usual inhabitants of a country as distinguished from strangers or foreigners. Adj. Belonging to or connected with one by the fact of one’s having been born there; that was the place or scene of one’s birth; belonging to by right or reason of the place or country of one’s birth or of that nation to which one belongs. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary i am thinking there will be a redefinition of what it is to “belong” and that it will follow rather a strict nativist adherence to the “by birth” portion of this definition with, however, some added limitations of what it is to be “born” here...not everyone born here is gong to be “native” and donny’s avowal to deport 15 to 20 million people will come with some updated version of the alien and sedition act of 1798 ( we will get to the sedition part soon )...that act stated, “...it shall be lawful for the President of the United States, at any time during the continuance of this act, to order all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States, or shall have reasonable grounds to suspect are concerned in any treasonable or secret machinations against the government thereof to depart out of the territory of the United States...and if any alien so removed or sent out of the United States by the President shall voluntarily return thereto, unless by permission of the President of the United States, such alien on conviction thereof shall be imprisoned so long as, in the opinion of the President, the public safety may require.”...someone needs to define “reasonable grounds”...that is considerable judicial power vested in the executive... the argument was and would be now that it is wholly unconstitutional...except the present court would likely turn a blind eye to the constitution much less say habeas corpus… considerable power donny would covet and, likely, acquire...and to borrow one from vonnegut, once the barbed wire at those detention camps along the border goes up when do you suppose it will come down? one can see a subset of the polity that would use them for a wider ethnic cleansing which would also refer back to the above definition of native and what interpretation it might be given...those camps may have an additional use as well, which we will get to in the sedition section below...detention camps have as foul a history a ghettos...there is no justice in them...my thoughts are the republican party, as it is now constituted, has no interest in justice, only power and expanded wealth…and once the maga promise fades ( and it surely will as it becomes kleptocracy ) a police force will become necessary to enforce belief...since there can be nothing at fault about the philosophy of the wonderful new order there must be some of those “secret machinations” going on...internal enemies...good thing that barbed wire is still there sedition i do not believe there is any media source for unfiltered information...from fox news to the new york times editors and news producers keep close watch on information that might offend advertisers...this still does not keep criticism of public officials out of the news, even though that criticism is thoroughly partisan in nature, depending on the media source, and may not reflect reality in any real sense...still i can see that there would, of necessity, need to be a means to make the “news” more supportive of government policy and less able to critically analyze what is going on...confuse the polity with distortions about the raising and lowering of the chocolate ration and leave policy and policy decisions in the dark...section 2 of An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States...a section of the alien and sedition act mandated, “ that if any persons shall write, print, utter, or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered, or published..any false, scandalous, and malicious writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them into contempt or disrepute...then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.”...an individual was brought to trial for saying he wished a cannonball would strike the president’s posterior...free speech died dead in 1798 and it seems ripe to do so again in 2025...”false”...i could accept that as libelous if proved...scandalous? what if true? and “malicious” seems to be altogether too subjective to be brought as evidence...in 1973 i may have said “fuck nixon”...i would probably not have flown a flag that said so yet I have seen “fuck biden” flags more than once...malicious seems to be the lexicon of political discourse in the maga era...wondering where the “fuck trump” flags are...so...wealth, religion, and racism coming together to attempt to impose viewpoints and rationalize actions through a false pose of populism, and willing to do so with legislation backed up by a biased supreme court...which will do its best to aid a full bore assault on the twenty-second amendment and institute “president for life”...all possible, not yet reality...at least not for a few months...and the maddening thing is i have no particular interest in seeing either of these self proclaimed leaders be elected...there is no positive choice here and i cannot find the lesser of two evils...either way this will not end well.

what has this accomplished?

well? what has it accomplished? does it illustrate donny as venal, corrupt, criminal, and amoral? probably, despite what his faithful say about it being a political exercise and not a legal one...then again, what else would they say? "he's guilty"? perhaps in private they would but he's their amoral felon and a public admission of guilt is imposible in light of the myth...so they will martyr him and use it to harden attitudes...i can see a number of groups that see trump as a vehicle to thier ends... republicans in congress...always rooting around for a fund-raising angle ( not that the whores on the other side of the aisle aren't greedy bastards...a whore is a whore and every politican in the country is a whore for votes an money ) sense an outraged base as an unmilked cash cow...white nationalists ( or racists in the non-cancel culture let's not wound anyone's feelings parlance ) would surely like to use the trumpist avowed intention to deport millions of "illegals" as a smoke screen for broader ethnic cleansing ( or genocide as they used to call it )...donny let them out from under the rock as "useful fools"...theocratic fundmantalists who want to impose thier beliefs on the great sinful multitudes, a multitude who find them a nuisance at best and, more often, self-righteous hypocrites hiding behind a bogus teleology, and take any sort of medical decison out of women's hands and keep us all on a moral path that leaves them in control...something like the authoritarian clavinists of mid-18th century scotland say...and then there's wealth which wants to expand the current national policy of debt creation until as much of the population as possible is reduced to debt penury and only able to service the interest on a principal that can never be paid off...capital is extractive and consequentialist ( i am working on a detailed description of a system i call extractive consequentialism )...it's what you have, not how you got it that matters and the narcissitic, amoral donny trump is a fine illustration of that...he's guilty of all that and more, however that does not matter...a conviction only highlights his convictions...and the campaign grinds on...blaming evryone but the responsible party...welcome to presidential politics...a choice between one dancing on the edge of dementia and an entitled thirteen year old with no self control who should be institutionalized for the greater good...the late empire is seizing up with entropy.

a redefiniton of belonging ( that whole "huddled masses" business was always a lie )

"...that is shall be lawful for the president of the united states at any time during the continuance of this act, to order all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the united states, or shall have reasonable grounds to suspect are concerned in any treasonable or secret machinations against the government thereof to depart out of the territory of the united states...and if any alien so removed out of the united states by the president shall voluntarily return thereto, unless by permission of the president of the united states, such alien on conviction thereof, shall be imprisoned so long as, in the opinion of the president, the public safety may require."the alien and sedition act of 1798 section 1._________________________________an act aimed mostly at french and irish immigrants since they were both usually catholic and likely to support thomas jefferson and the democratic-republicans in the upcoming preisdential election this places the president ( namely john adams ) in a position of arbitrary power over who belonged and who did not ( "he shall judge"..."in the opinion of the president"...and define "reasonable grounds as well as explaining why it nullifies the precept of habeas corpus )...that this violates the constitution is obvious...in the "virginia resolution" james madison ( a "founder" central to the creation of the constitution who, presumably, knew what he meant as he helped to frame it ) said there was a need to "...protest against the palpable and alarming infractions of the constitution, in the two late cases of the 'alien and sedition acts' ( and we will be getting to the "sedition" part in another post )passed at the last session of congress, the first of which exercises a power no where delegated to the federal government, and which by uniting legislative and judicial powers to those of the executive, subverts the general principles of free government..."...one senses, depending on the outcome of the next presidential election...that there is a forthcoming redefinition of "belonging" since don trump maintians he intends to deport between 15 and 20 million "illegal aliens" and that he is prepared to utilize the military ( in his words "the national guard" ) and military bases to do so...some of his acolytes have suggested creating "detention camps" as an alternative and that phraseology is dangerously close to "concentration camp" as well as some of the phraseology don has used to describe the intended deportees as "poisoning the blood of our country" which is a step away from the term "vermin"...this may not be fascism however it is definitely unconstitutional ( at least in madison's vision of the document ) and authoritarian...and, to paraphrase kurt vonnegut, once that barbed wire goes up do you suppose it will ever come down? not while there are "internal enemies " ( and they will materialize...authoritarians need enemies...ask nixon ) who may, in a misguided and soft-hearted fashion, disagree with these measures...legislative sleight of hand has been used to before to rationalize an authoritarian president...everything old could be new again...we will be getting to how this may be construed as "sedition" in another post.

light?

"a light unto the nations" david ben-gurion___________________________ for the most part i try to be tolerant...that i fail in this in regard to politicians and those of wealth ( fungible originators of oppression ) proves the partiality of my tolerance...we all have biases and , like everyone else, i believe mine to be warranted...i may be mistaken...i can question myself and i can change how i view things...stasis is death...and even if i find politicians and those of wealth reprehensible i do not recall ever advocating violence against them...people have a right to live unmolested if they are not molesting others...to be tolerated for what they are and what they believe...only actions should be the basis for accountability...and humans act and react...often violently...and who is acting in self defense and who is spreading belief by the sword is a thorny question to resolve...infinitely regressible with no real first cause in sight...that the proto-israelis were willing to engage in terrorism ( we can start with the king david hotel bombing and go from there ) would likely be disputed ( possibly violently ) by some...again, a thorny question, given the experience of the european jews in the past century...what i am willing to say about the current situation in the middle east is that british imperial thinking is another central issue in the israeli-palestinian conflict and, despite the moral high ground staked out by the israelis and the hegemons here in the late empire, the israelis ( much like the u.s. military viz. viet nam ) would seem to have learned all the worng lessons from the above mentioned experiences of european jewry...there is no moral high ground here for anyone and universities suppressing freedom of speech when that speech ( and those protests ) substantively threaten to undermine the hegemons' worldview here in this country is not much of anything new ( viet nam again )...some light we have shining here