taxes, bureaucrats, and a culture of suspicion

i went off to the county government ( ha!) complex yesterday afternoon to pay the property tax on my mom's house since there was some snafu with the electronic payment i had tried to make ( odd because the payment for my taxes went through an i did that online )...i had expected a dreary round of queuing and condescension from tenured bureaucrats but discovered a fordian assembly-line philosophy instead...this did not preclude any small indignities...simply sped them up...from the clearly bored county sheriff manning the metal detector ( who was rummaging around the tray people emptied their pockets into obviously searching for terrorist weapons or, perhaps, subversive tracts...pointless since the real terrorists and criminals were already at work in the building ) and who sullenly asked "you know where you're going?"...do any of us really know where we are going? what this whole business of existence is about? i am skeptical...but that wasn't what the deputy had on his mind was it? Yeah...i know where the treasurer's office is...when i arrived at my destination another bored worker examined my papers and asked if i was paying by check or cash...when i indicated cash she directed me to a longish line of people waiting to be attended to by two cashiers...i dutifully got inline to surrender the lucre and as i advanced i noticed that along the counter that ran the length of the cash line people paying by check were being expeditiously processed and released while the cash folks plodded along...as i neared the cashier's window i also noticed some arcane manipulating and arrangement of wads of cash taking place...screened by the people in front of me i could not exactly tell what was what...finally i arrived and plunked down a stack of twenties with the paperwork and the cashier arranged the bills in a pile with jefferson's portrait pointing all the same way...she then fanned the bills out in a semicircle so each bill was exposed and drew a line across them with a pen designed to detect counterfeit bills and the reason for the time consuming line became apparent...we were suspect because we had cash...checks ( cashier or money order only ) were safe and so was technology...but the herd are a wily bunch and cash can be faked...better safe than sorry...check the citizens' bills for fakery to save the county valuable time and money in tracking them down...wouldn't want the public to defraud an honest political system.

orwell takes a lesson

"...it was sanctioned by the governmental decision of february 1942 'to destroy the morale of the enemy population and, in particular, the industrial workers.'...an enterprise of the material and organizational dimensions of the bombing offensive, which by a.j.p. taylor's estimate swallowed up one third of the entire british production of war materiel, had such momentum of its own that short run corrections in its course...were more or less ruled out..." w.g.sebald, "on the natural history of destruction"____ "the essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. war is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise have been used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. even when weapons of war are nor destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without having produced anything that can be consumed...ultimately scrapped as obsolete never having brought any material benefits to anybody..." george orwell. "1984"_________ w.g. was born during the war and eric lived through it...contemporaries for a brief time they both understood that war involved destruction but took somewhat different tacks on the subject...w.g. ascribing it to institutional inertia and eric to an act of deliberate economic suppression of the masses to keep them from using any leisure time and material comfort to question the quality of their lives...as much as i admire eric i am going to come down on w.g.'s institutional inertia argument...but not without pointing out that civilians are always the target in a war and anything governments or military bureaucrats have to say to the contrary is rank and morally expedient bullshit...looking around at some of the people i know i see that they are sedated by their comfortable material lives and are usually only aroused when there is a power outage that cuts off the bears game when they are in the "red zone" or when the real housewives of whatever tawdry burg are up to no good...the consumerist utopia lobtomizes many for the benefit of the few ( and even eric's contention that scrapped obsolete, scrapped military hardware doesn't benefit anyone leaves out the manufacturer's cost plus overruns guaranteed profits [ honest abe would buy anything remotely germane to the army of the potomac and call it money well spent...a great innovator ]someone turned a buck )and generates unfulfillable expectations in a world that has access to media but not goods and never will because of the finite nature of the planet...resource substitution is the valium of economists and a complete lie or the product of intellectual dishonesty...either way...they are alchemists screwing around with the future...

this is only what i expected

"i find that by letters which i have received, that the public creditors are to be the body who are to rise in judgement against me and try to expel me from the senate. this is only what i expected. nor are they the only ones. the adoption of the new constitution raised a singular ferment in the minds of men. every one ill at ease in his finances; every one out at the elbows in his circumstances; every ambitious man, every one desirous of a short cut to wealth and honors, cast their eyes on the new constitution as the machine which could be wrought to their purposes, either in the funds of speculation it would afford, the offices it would create, or the jobs to be obtained under it. not one of these has found a patron in me. in fact i have generally set my face against such pretensions. as such men are generally wanting in virtue, their displeasure, nay their resentment, may be expected. 'why, you want nothing neither for yourself nor friends!' said a senator one day to me in some surprise. it was somewhat selfish but i could not help uttering a wish that he could say so..." july 9th 1790 william maclay's journal of the second session of the first congress._______________________________________________________________ so...feeding at the public trough probably was a concept that predated the constitution...how not if there was a line of card sharps, defrocked clergy, and stock-jobbers waiting in line to dip in? bailouts and corporate welfare would seem to have been part and parcel of the history of the federal government since its inception as a lawfully ( someone needs to take the time to explain why i should harbor any respect for a legal system propagated by a confederacy of whores, seemingly from day one...rule of law my ass ) constituted entity...the past five years of federal handouts and the debacle of quantitative easing is simply a continuation of the "american dream " as conceived by post-colonial political operatives with an axe to grind and a powerful lust for a life of fast cash and low rent debauchery that required the creation of a new and deeply inbred native born aristocracy as a yankee response to the twisted group in "the old country" that came up with the hellfire club... fooled into believing in their own righteousness by parodying the relentless puritanism of their exiled forefathers with tent revivals and a national currency sprinkled with the word god this strain of shameless political hookers carries on deluding themselves with ersatz ideals of public service and an adherence to duty and robbing the republic blind...fuck these people.

reading tainter ( as opposed to jared diamond )

"specific evolutionary 'progress' is inversely related to general evolutionary 'potential.'" "...success at adaptation breeds conservatism; dominant polities are less able to accommodate change. successful complex societies become locked into their adaptations..." "since change is rarely in the best interests of the ruling group, and there is a lack of cohesion and common interest between groups, no mechanism exists for gradual adjustment to changing circumstances. pressures lead to collapse rather than to structural change." "...all societies, complex or otherwise, run the risk of adapting so well to existing circumstances that change becomes impossible." joseph a. tainter, from "the collapse of complex societies."______________________________________________________________ so...the "developed economies" are nearing the end of a three hundred year ( or so ) run of a bonanza of cheap, high quality energy, laid down during the carboniferous era and the social and infrastructures are deeply embedded in adaptations to that extraordinary windfall...( don't believe me? how do you feel when the power fails? what in your home functions without electricity?i have a lot of books personally, but when the power goes out for any extended length of time my neighborhood empties as people flee to relatives, or bars, or resturants, or starbucks...anywhaere they can find oases of the technology that has failed at home...television, wi-fi, whatever [and no, i haven't missed the irony that i am saying thison the internet...i am part of the consumerist culture as well...like it or not..i'm just looking for escape routes] or when gasoline prices spike...you're trapped bucko...get a grip )...i can think of at least five service stations within a mile of my house and i could drive from here to detroit on back roads and city streets, much less highways...what are all those streets and gas stations for? adaptations to cheap energy... all that sunk cost in infrastructure and all the profits left to wring out of petrochemicals mean that resource will be dominant until it becomes absolutely unsustainable...then what? ( and the first one of you to say "resource substitution" gets rapped on the knuckles...that is the valium of economists...hired guns of greed...trying to lull us into complacency )...the worldview emanating out of the media and the excuses and explanations those criminal whores in whoretown are propagating won't make the collapse any easier to deal with...they are tools of hegemonic culture and change is not "in the best interest of the ruling group"...even they won't come through this unscathed...less poor is still the new rich.

one for tom

carboniferous detritovores

"according to the united nations statistical yearbook by 1971 the per capita rate of energy consumption was about sixty times greater than in india...so it would not have been too inaccurate to suggest that , for a realistic comparison of american population pressure with that of india, the ratio between their respective population ties should have been multiplied by a factor of sixty. the number of actual people per square mile in the united states was about on eighth of what it was in india . but if each american were was about sixty times as colossal as each indian, then american population pressure was equivalent to there being twelve billion people living the indian pace of life on territory as large as the united states." overshoot: the ecological basis of revolutionary change. william r catton, jr.____________________________________________________________________________ catton's book was written in 1982 ( still relevant despite all the deniers out there...easy to find but it is a scholarly work...there are footnotes, end notes, and a bibliography...weekend readers should probably skip it...and let me add that it isn't because it is too "smart" for anyone...it's just dry as dust in some really arid stretches ) ) and the figures he is quoting are, for reasons opaque to me, eleven years old at the time of writing..that does not invalidate the comparison, however, it just calls for an update...the indian subcontinent has come a long way towards the "developed" world in the intervening forty-two years and, according to the 2012 united nations statistical yearbook energy consumption in the u s is now only 4.62070819 times as much as that of india which reduces the u s population pressure compared to india from around twelve billion citizens " living the indian pace of life" to around 1,279,600,000 americans humming along like there's no tomorrow and no future generations to consider ( i have a granddaughter now and future projections make grandpa worried about quality of life for the little sweetie )...and that's the point...the whole fucking ponzi scheme of industrial capitalism is unsustainable but , of course, those in the hegemonic culture who control the privatization of socially created wealth ( and we are all privatizing that wealth...but the elite controls who gets what and they are greedy fuckers ) can't recognize this and their political creatures who bullshit us continually with campaigning rhetoric can't admit it either because, like the barometer called "the market", it is all built on faith and doubt collapses the system..well.. i am a heretic and heterodoxy in a time of faith is a dangerous business...but that never stopped me before...the chinese use nearly as much energy as we do and as the indians continue to close in on both of us , based on the use of completely non-renewable resources, things will be going bust...energy costs will not go down...they will continue to rise ( resource substitution is the valium of economists )...and so will conflicts...over water, oil, rare earths, and who gets how much of what's left..people are shits and brotherly love doesn't buy a summer home in the hamptons...of course that cottage will be useless when you can't find a way to get there.

kulturkampf

"an authentic culture roots into the collective experience of a community's past and from this sources draws meaning for the present and tools for the future."---john greer_________________________________________________________________________it's probably a bit more complex than that...i have been reading greer's book " the ecotechinic future" which is another book about the need to move away from a consumerist society based on the use of petrochemicals in just about everything and "relocalize" most facets of life as the fossil fuel based society winds down...he at least has the sense ( unlike some of his contemporaries )to maintain that it will be a gradual evolution that will take some time and he claims to have no real idea of what a future society will look like beyond some vague outlines...this, in a world crammed full of pundits ( listening friedman? ) who know what to do and could save us all if only we'd do what they say, is refreshing...he also misses the point ( i think ) that culture isn't completely dead despite the very best efforts of a capital driven consumerist utopia to kill it...regionalism has been a much maligned concept in the post-eisenhower age of interstate freeways and ungodly commutes...television and the exurbs with standardized existences was supposed to make us homogenous...but they still do things differently in northern alabama than they do in northwest indiana...some ( but obviously not all ) of that has to do with the environmental differences...we also have only a partially shared history...the community past in huntsville is divergent form the community past in lake station...we share human origins and universals ( sorry coach ) but not experience or local conditions...so the point is that every book about the need for a "transition" that i have read ( and that spate of reading is quickly drawing to a close...once you decide what is what it is time to stop reading and do something...if you don't you just become part of some intellectual salon taking about what needs to be done ) is about rebuilding culture...adjusting the community to local conditions...turning what's available into a viable way of life...growing some roots and re-establishing community connections...nothing particularly earth shattering in that...it's what humans did for centuries before the industrial revolution and its drive to develop the ultimate consumerism short circuited it... luddite, neo-luddite, pessimist, cynic...all adjectives i have heard recently...the cost of at least attempting to take a pragmatic and realistic viewpoint about the limits capital refuses to countenance because their alchemists in economist guise say they don't exist...the dog philosophers and i are old friends and the social constructs that capital creates to convince itself and the rest of us that those limits are non-existent are as abstract and phony as any that crates of thebes railed against...as much as it would like to capital can't kill culture...the distortions consumerism have placed on it would seem to have their limits.