strange or odious

"whatever was strange or odious, whoever was guilty or suspected, might hope, in the obscurity of that immense capital, to elude the vigilance of the law. in such a various conflux of nations, every teacher, whether of truth or of falsehood, every founder, of a virtuous or a criminal association, might easily multiply his disciples or accomplices."edward gibbon. the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire. vol.II chapter XV_________________________________________ yes i know drawing exact parallels between the past and now is unsound and has the potential to be wildly inaccurate...then again, an empire is an empire and certain anthropogenic constructs can serve to funnel human behaviors in similar directions and you have to admit that ed, who was writing from the center of a burgeoning empire that saw itself as heir to rome, would have a fair understanding of the way things are in whoretown two hundred and forty-three years later...and all you have to do is look at the neo-classical kitsch that dominates whoretown to see where the founders ( count how many times you read the word "empire" in the federalist papers ) and their successors thought they were headed...like all empires they started locally and expanded and wrote it all off as "civilizing" the barbarian other...one of the public faces of the "odious" part got shit-canned today and the world is a safer place...a jingoist has been turned out from the powerful and he will wail in the wilderness about being "misunderstood" until some fascist think tank snaps him up ( or he starts his own )...unfortunately he is only a public face of a severely demented and paranoid infrastructure of spooks that will blithely go on spying on ( and since you are reading this, what do you guys think of the bee photos i have been posting on facebook? be honest but fair ) and , when they think it of vital importance to "national interest" killing people...meanwhile the criminal founders in whoretown go on aggrandizing themselves at the public purse and passing that off as "public service"...there is no end to this beyond collapse...and all empires do...and when it does the entire national structure will crack along fault lines that have been simmering along for decades if not centuries growing deeper and more bitter beneath the surface..."releasing historical energy" is an historian's euphemism for an upsurge in social disruption and violence as we adjust to the "new reality"...fake news...alternate facts...hurricanes in alabama...and a parade of less than charismatic wannabes are just a start...bolton is gone and i, for one, will not miss that unsmiling, crimped, bitter, constipated face...however, events will still unfold without him and this is not going to end well...the puking buddha agrees.

sludge

“but in a computer driven, knowledge-based world economy, educated americans may have more in common with ( and, ultimately, more loyalty to ) their highly educated friends and counterparts in europe, latin america, and asia than they do with their less educated fellow americans a few miles away. such public infrastructure such as airports and roads will still have to be built and maintained, if only to link such places as johnson county and lawrence; but in the future this might be done by private capital, both domestic and foreign, whatever ‘foreign’ might eventually mean, perhaps no more than a fading memory of a time when cultures ( and nations ) were still distinct and colorful, as on today’s map, rather than the free-floating aggregations they will have become at the upper end of the world economic spectrum and the unpromising sludge they will have become at the bottom.” robert d. Kaplan an empire wilderness________________________________________________________________________ the “volk” versus the “rootless cosmopolitan”…well…wealth controls government and legislates to protect and expand its prerogatives…and there are gated enclaves all around the area…not quite walled compounds yet, however, given the elites bedrock belief that it can escape both climate and economic upheavals through a strategic retreat to political, economic, and philosophical fortifications, that may not be long in coming…if they have the time and resources aren’t reallocated to shoring up the above mentioned private infrastructure that will surely take a beating in the storms, natural and man-made ( although both may be anthropogenic ) that are sure to come…i am of the “sludge” despite being reasonably educated…firmly rooted in the traditions and mores of what was “working class” or “blue collar”…unionized…paid by the hour…and balkanized in its loyalties to craft, geographical region, political affiliation, car make, and what beer it drank…there is a clearly growing disparity in wealth and outlook ( not that there hasn’t always been a significant disparity in world view ) between the elites and the rest…and as the “sludge” is forced further down the economic order into penury it becomes more susceptible to demagogic manipulation…it wants answers as to why this is happening and there are more than a few willing to provide answers that enhance their positions, both political and economic…for the moment those provided “explanations” are serving to further divide the “sludge”…turning it against itself to the enhancement ( or, at least , perceived enhancement…there is considerable debate on this point and viewpoints among the “sludge” vary widely…the “sludge” has many faces…which is why there is an opening for manipulation...a fair selection of “the other” to choose from…that same diversity of outlook may also generate more rational alternative explanations…there is hope in difference as well as division ) of the preeminence of the manipulator-in-chief…and it will continue to work…albeit erratically…until the more impressionable elements among the “sludge” come to realize they have far more in common with the rest of the “sludge” than with the manipulators and begin to act from that realization…the question then becomes ( and there are, i think, no ready answers to this ) where to act on this realization…the institutions that are in place to allegedly allow “the people” a direct say in how they are governed have been the purview of the elite since the beginning and with an increasing disparity of interests the likelihood of substantive change coming from within those institutions is questionable…all one need do is tally up the number of millionaires in congress and factor in the cost of obtaining a congressional seat and the obligations that would engender to those who bore the cost to see which way the wind blows there…violence is not an answer…it would only engender an overwhelmingly violent response...and, sadly, the elite seem to have successfully goaded the “sludge” to turn its violence on itself...which, incidentally, has served to deepen the divisions among the “sludge” as the debate over these self-inflicted outrages becomes increasingly strident…chto delat…what is to be done? co-operation would seem to be a key…the “sludge” needs desperately to overcome its divisions and begin to work towards self-support…you have to have friends and a community if you are going to be poor ( and while the economy may be “sizzling” [per the new york times] for the elite the rest of the economy is faced with multiple part-time jobs at minimal [and decreasing where possible] wages )…so alternate and “unofficial” social structures and institutions…crafted through trial and error and the experiences of the “sludge”...separate, parallel, and as far out of sight and control of the “official” institution as possible are necessary…the preservation of mayan ritual and belief in the face of the spanish conquest , the creation of a parallel “ illegal” political structure by kosovar albanians after the serbian occupation of Kosovo, or irish “hedge schools preserving gaelic for example are a few that come to mind….the “sludge” will still have a “distinct and colorful” culture in spite of what the elite believe…or does for that matter…culture is learning…culture is adaptation to local conditions ( and so diverse )…culture is problem solving…culture is transmission of knowledge and memory…culture would seem to be genetically encoded…the “sludge” can find its own answers…move in a different direction…away from the elite…rendering it irrelevant. so it’s labor day…the meaningless bone of a holiday tossed by the hegemonic culture to the labor it needs but detests ( if not fears…we are fast approaching the centenary of the 1919 steel strike that saw federal troops in gary, Indiana and the palmer red raids that were mostly a reaction to the fear of labor organizing and increasing militancy )…the end of summer…the end of fun…and removed from that unholy day of international labor celebration on mayday which marks those damned haymarket anarchists…i will find something red to wear tomorrow when I got to work…and, while my immediate supervisors are decent souls trying to earn a living, i will not forget that the corporation is not my friend…extractive, self-absorbed, sociapathic…management hiding behind the shell of a corporate “individual” as cover for their own sociopathy…conniving expropriation rendered legal.

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.

swill

"advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket." george orwell______________________the latest edition of the new yor times "t" style magazine came with the paper today and it is the "women's fashion" issue and while i am fairly sure of my approach to this you will need to decide if this is a public service, a practical joke, corporate structures seeking profit, propaganda, or a combination of any or all at once...it would seem that the times has carried its self-proclaimed monopoly on "truth" over to the swill bucket and has some definite ideas about how i should be thinking in these troubled times of slobo II...and, while i agree with much of their take on slobo there is a considerable gap between perceived reality and the time's reportage that no glossy magazine can overcome...

the cover announces the advent of "the new androgyny" with a subtext that includes "everyone"...

and some ( mind you, some ) of the "fashions" do indeed lend themselves to opening doubts about the model's sex...a "that's pat" sort of thing...i am disinclined to make judgements about anyone's orientation...as long as everyone involved is of age to say "yes" and says "yes" with no duress then it is none of my business and i will live and let live...and i know there is no privacy anymore...however that should not mean i am open to being propagandized...i am part of "everyone" and i am not wearing this under any circumstances...my days of needing to fit in are long dead and givenchy and gucci can go pound sand...

anxiety or marked irritation? true enough that anxiety can crop up in these slobo ridden times..however i find more of a relentless irritation with the unapologetic arrogance erupting from all across the motherfucking political spectrum...the stench from whoretown is deeply putrescent and it may take more than a lake of fire to cleanse it...the times is all over arrogance like a cheap suit...they are not shy about telling me what i "need to know" ( check out "your weekend briefing: here's what you need to know about the week's top stories" as if i am suddenly incapable of any stripe of independent thought ) and how to go about finding it out ( from them )...a transparent attempt at "news branding" which all the "news media" indulge in because they are, at bottom, corporate structures seeking profit and building a customer base...like any other retailer ( check out the "times store" while you peruse the web site...if you can stomach it )...worldview is their product ( along with t shirts and wine )...apparently anxiety sells clothing...

according to the caption this woman (? it is the "androgyny" issue ) is wearing $11901 worth of designer clothing...but the times does not pander to an elite...

given that $11901 is something like an everyday clothing expenditure i would have to think that the answer to this poser is there is never enough that's why they need "growth" and why they are 1.) depriving as many people as possible of a living wage and, 2) doing so to drive as many people as possible into debt penury ( with help from advertising ) because debt creates "new" money...extraction as a first principle...

i would call cordless lamps flashlights and i have ones that are rechargeable, solar powered, and have an internal crank dynamo to recharge them...don't need any of these either...don't need any of these things...you?

"you will not be beaten"

it has always been a violent country born of a western culture that has an inherent violence ingrained from its roots...there has already been one civil war here...and i was reflecting on trump's clear incitement of an obvious uptick in that inherent violence and i flashed on slobodan milosevic telling kosovar serbs "you will not be beaten"...milosevic use the kosovar serbs as a vehicle to promote serbian nationalism over a yugoslav identity in the central committee of the serbian communist party...once he gained the support of that committee and put serbian nationalism at the front of the agenda the other constituents ( croatia, montenegro, etc ) were forced to wither accept or reject serbian prominence in the country...that was roundly rejected and the state broke up into its constituent parts with al the resulting violence...

which thrust him to prominence and was a marker along the road to the dissolution of yugoslavia...none of which especially ended well...and now we seem to have a president saying "you will not be beaten" to a group of people who have always been here but have had to "go to ground" in the face of a society trying to be more at ease with diversity...privileging white nationalism as the nationalism of the country over a more inclusive and diverse identity...and using that malevolent base to spew out his own twisted disdain for...near as i can tell...everyone but donald trump...looking around i find i am not the first to make this connection...as pleased as i am to have found it on my own i see it was made early on in this non-presidential presidency by a number of people...that this has significant potential to end "not especially well" should be obvious...what i find myself asking myself is who ( and here i mean in the halls of government ans specifically the whores in the senate )...beyond the fore mention malevolent base...is accommodating themselves to this vileness...and why? personal gain leaps to mind and no one in washington is shy about money...none of them will retire like pepe mujica...government" of the people, by the people, and for the people" has always been a shiny lie...if nothing else the last twenty years or so should have illuminated the oligarchical nature of american "democracy"...it should also be manifestly clear that the likelihood of the senate, in its current configuration, convicting an impeached trump is exceptionally slim...and ever increasing violence could lead to another civil war...or it could be the reichstag fire and suspended elections in 2020...or...it might just be "business as usual" in the west while the orient waits to see what happens to the barbarians...slobo the second has arrived as the decline of the "american century" accelerates and the confused fringe looks for answers as the nationalist indoctrination they have been inculcated with continues to shift farther out of sync with the realities of the new direction of geopolitics...one wonders which identity will ultimately be chosen.

notes on notes, the punditry, and objectivity

"political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts, but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties,,,much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from context and and doctored so as to change their meaning. events, which it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied...the general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakeable fact can be impudently denied." notes on nationalism.george orwell.october 1945________________goeorge's "nationalism" is a bit broader than the ordinary...he includes "isms"...ideologies...and religion...and ideas that set themselves solely as counterpoints to other ideologies with no positive ideas for alternatives...and so this framework would lend itself to an analysis of the present state of politics and mass media where the divisions are clearly along partisan ideological lines and have little to do with fact as opposed to the subjective matter of "truth" which is what the media distortions are pandering to...reinforcing world views in spite of what may actually be happening...and all to the benefit of corporate profit and political expediency...shopping around the web ( and bearing in mind you can find anything here that will support your views...the web is media too )https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/...this site finds most pundits "counterfactual" and they do have a fair cross section of the political spectrum...from micheal moore to rush limbaugh...and then have a look at this:https://www.medicaldaily.com/being-confident-better-pundits-being-correct-246304 if pundits are correct 47% of the time they are doubtlessly doing better than politicians who basically lie for a living...we seem to be awash in a flood of allegations, counter allegations, distortions, lies, emotional assaults and blackmailing, banalities, outrageous claims ( "when you lie, tell the big lie" ), and a deep dose of denial about a lot of things we should be paying attention to but can't because the distortions and existential hum of all the bullshit are in the way...that i have no faith in politicians and very little in media is apparent...which begs the question, in the face of that what do we do? the political system is geared towards interest groups...it does not respond well to individuals...we get to vote for elected officials who then, for the most part, go on to work for the interests of their donors more so than their individual constituents...“[democracy is an]institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s votes.” Capitalism, socialism, and democracy p.269...that is from joseph shumpeter...an early to mid 20th century political economist and harvard professor who maintained that elections were popularity contests and not much more in terms of actual representation...i find myself inclined to agree...which leaves the ballot box as a poor vehicle for change...i am an individual and so will act as an individual despite the systems inherent bias against them..my actions are the one one thing i exert some control over ( we could go off on to the hegemonic culture and how, since, like everyone else, i am so deeply embedded in it that some actions that run counter to it are not possible without a good deal of negative sanction...but read gramsci instead...if you have the patience )i have some choice in what i do or do not support and some choice in how i spend money ( but not really complete control for instance, if i stop paying my utility bill to protest my power company's use of coal fired generators they will, eventually, shut off my gas and electricity at which point everything in my house ceases to function..and what do i do? pay the bill...embedded )...so i can choose not to patronize say fox news ( electricity costs money ) or (ugh ) the national interest ( subscription costs ) or buy products made by nestle or nabisco at the supermarket ( but it is difficult to avoid the supermarket altogether...seeing a pattern developing? )...and i can sift through as much media noise as i can stand to try to ferret out something of a balanced picture of events...as far as that is possible given my own biases...past that i can work towards making as much of it as possible irrelevant...willfully ignoring pundits of all stripes...eschewing as much electronic media as possible ( yes print is still biased but it takes longer to assemble and you can see events unfold in some anticipation of it and make value judgements as there is a bit of a lag )...and shutting off the media and going out in the yard to think instead of just passively listen...most of it isn't simple and it may well be ineffective...but i have to say stalking dragonflies with a camera cuts down on the angst...the zeitgeist is awful...do what you can to stay whole.

this is not a political farce

i have been consciously avoiding the foul political landscape in this tired and frightened country for a number of complicated reasons...mostly because in the emotionally charged atmosphere no one is is listening to anyone anyway...which is lamentable because i am inclined to believe that this is exactly what that entitled self-absorbed clown wants...if we are busily spending our time arguing and threatening one another we are not going to have the time to look even remotely closely at the corrupt kleptocracy this wannabe authoritarian is running out of the white house..nixon was paranoid but he wasn't corrupt ( and if you know me you realize what a stretch it is for me to make even the slightest positive statement about tricky dick )...this plutocrat is as venal as they come...der fur hair has never been presidential...how could he? he clearly was never socialized as a child...amoral...asocial...sociopathic...the corporate zeitgeist incarnate...corrupt and vile...his latest insults aimed at members of congress over their ethnicity and origins are just another line of evidence of his racist intent and his empowering of racist elements in this country to underpin his authoritarian pretensions...sad angry belittled bewildered frightened people doing what humans do...looking for reasons why and finding all the wrong ones in this ego run riot...this should be a wake up for congress and they should seize the opportunity to kick this fat turd to the political curb...remove the legal protections the presidency confers on his venality...unseal all the indictments...and let him finish his days in detention..or in an ignominious exile in putinville...as impotent and bloated as ferdy marcos in hawaii...unfortunately far too many of the people who should be acting in defiance of this insult to "the people" have no real interest in the people and are involved in trying to take his place...or, at least, insuring their continued presence in the august assembly of whores called congress...the"american century" has been dead for about twenty years now and as we slowly fade into a parody of great brittan this is the sort of "leadership" we can expect...backward looking ( and trumpy is reaching back to lynchings people...he is fucking dangerous ) and indulging in recidivist and/or self interested behaviors reminiscent of "the gilded age"...jay gould...charles tyson yerkes...bathhouse john...hinky dink kenna...everything old is new again...this will not end well.