there are elections and then there are elections

just got home from some after work events...including discharging my civic duty...yep...election day...and the most useless and patently foul abuse of "the people's will" since the federalist papers or the seventeenth communist party congress in 1934...only three delegates crossed off kirov's name on the ballot but stalin won the election and somewhere over a thousand of the delegates were arrested during the following purges and many just plain disappeared...kirov was assassinated by some stalinist patsy and that left only trotsky to clean up...stalin's boys acted quickly to cover up the embarassing defeat and the covert party revolt was ruthlessly crushed...lake county doesn't need the nkvd or yagoda or beria to keepa lid on dissent...the party has less violent methods here...in two pages of ballot in the democratic ( oh please! ) primary i believe i saw three races in which the candidate was not running unopposed ( pete visclosky for instance was the only name on the ballot for district representative...my vote...or abstention for that matter...reduced to farce )...even stalin had kirov's name on the ballot for form's sake...and i have to wonder if that damned ass hamilton would have disapproved of any of it.

guardians of the law

"people may act as they think proper in their elections, and they still will do so. lawyers and merchants are generally their choice...lawyers have a keenness and a fondness for disputation. wrangling is their business. but long practice in supporting any cause that offers has obliterated regard to right and wrong. the question only is, which is my side?...o candor and integrity ...where are ye to be found? seldom in professional men." wilian maclay's journal of the first congress. 5 june 1789__________________________of the five hundred and thirty-five voting members of the current congress one hundred and seventy-three are lawyers...that's just under a third...over half are millionaires ( one presumes this excludes campaign funds ) this explains much and maclay provides a solid line of evidence that wealth and law were bedfellows from the start..."i fear we shall follow on nor cease until we have reached ...all the frivolities, fopperies, and expense practiced in european governments. i grieve to think that many individuals among us are aiming at these objects with unceasing diligence." hamilton's vision lives on.

420

it's april twentieth...the obscure formula that pinpoints the easter holiday on the secular calendar is ignorant of human affairs and so the holy day falls on marijuana day...which, since it is a later manifestation of the linear timeline imposed by the enlightenment and historians ( and cheapjack novelists as well )that falls on hitler's birthday...so many competing religions...secular and spiritual ( although let us not lose sight of the fact that hitler was profoundly catholic )...so which do we choose? the holy carpenter? the tao of the stoned hipster? a deep draught form a cup of intolerance? none of the m have it right...and each is as limiting in its own fashion...reefer? done that and found it lacking...never a favorite of mine and abandoned with youth...slow and stupid...perhaps not as slow and stupid as i found myself with other substances...but the same general effect...i am done with them all...racism? slow , stupid, and self-limiting...a blinkered and a jaundiced view of a diverse world...hitler was wrong...all fundamentalists are wrong...all fundamentalists are teleological and intolerant of criticism of the utopia..a secular religion of evil..or a spiritual one for that matter...witch trials, heretics, inquisitions, conquistadors, settlers, divine right...the theologian and the executioner have long been bedfellows...they tolerate and support one another...no thanks...organized belief is just that ...organized...for someone's agenda...i find none of it believable...they all have it wrong...a multiplicity of theocracies to choose from...i won't abide a missionary...if you come to convert me come armed...there will be resistance.

debs is invisible in terre haute

eugene v debs was the socialist party of america's presidential candidate five times in the last century or so and he was born in terre haute indiana...a day jaunt to that burg today had me wondering if i would find any trace of him or of his home town's recognition of his existence there...there may be some but i didn't see any...and given the political small-mindedness of this state it comes as no surprise...the statehouse is rank with ignorance backed by the hubris willful stupidity imparts to the dullwitted...so be it...i come form a part of the state that has been grossly misunderstood and vilified by those pompous twits fro years...they are pathologically incapable of understanding...on the other hand, benton county held out some hope for this melting pot of fools...wind power has been a staple of rural america for quite a while and if you squint at the top photo you should just make out an old farm windmill of the sort that used to drive well pumps and, in later years, generate home electricity ( it is on the left hand side of the road about the middle of the photo and mid-distance betweenthe road we're on and the wind turbines in the background )...it is in juxtaposition to a huge wind farm that...according to benton county's web page...is home to five hundred wind turbines generating electricity...they are not completely energy clean...no doubt fossil fuels were used to mine and refine the metals in them...there is doubtlessly petrochemically based plastic in them...energy was used in their manufacture, assembly ,and shipping...and in their placement and erection as well...but they hold out some spark of progress in a thoroughly reactionary state...with luck coming changes will make them irrelevant.

indiana is a hotbed of dissent

"Since 1915, the principal supporter of daylight saving in the United States has been the Chamber of Commerce on behalf of small business and retailers," says Downing. "The Chamber understood that if you give workers more sunlight at the end of the day they'll stop and shop on their way home. It's not just golf—the barbecue industry loves daylight savings, so do the home good stores because people tend to go out of their houses, see that their roofs need replacing and buy more shingles. It's a really important part of niche marketing for the retail industry."-michael dowling__________________________________________________ you can read some specious bullshit about the miniscule amount of electricity that daylight savings time allegedly saves but when i look at all the little electricity vampires on all the electronic gizmos around here...from the little red light on my monitor that's on even when the monitor is off or the neat little lit up logo on the goddamned flat screen tv in the livingroom or the green lights on the dishwasher ( which i patently refuse to use )or the red ones on the hardwired smoke detectors i know that's all lame posturing and cheap rationalization....the real reason is neatly outlined by dowling and is the brainchild of the chamber of commerce...that crypto-fascist purveyor of gluttons consumption...they are as doomed as dinosaurs and they can take their time theft and get bent, pound sand, eat shit and die...whatever strikes their greedy little fancy..everything those cretins do is extractive and deleterious to the environment...i will be forced to reset my clocks because i still have to deal with the "real world" ( despite its continual, illusory belief that "business as usual" will remain unchanged within established parameters ) and it has no sense of humor...greed will do that...as a footnote this state has been a bastion of resistance to daylight savings time resulting in a chaotic temporal situation at time, until that paragon of neo con politics turned university president sign a statute making the state observe it...another reason to say fuck these people...where is the lake of fire?

i'm right, you're wrong. why are you still talking?

"Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because 'the last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated. • 1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers. • 2. Publish their names. • 3. Seize all their grain from them. • 4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday's telegram. • Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of versts around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: "they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks". Telegraph receipt and implementation. Yours, Lenin. Find some truly hard people"________________________________________________________ this is what happens when teleological bureaucratization becomes the standard for government. lenin took marx's dictum "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" ( and i notice just now that this doesn't say anything about individual desire...only need...no wonder capital hates marx so...he denies it it's greatest manipulative tool ) and rewrote it as "from each according to our needs, to each according to how necessary they are to our ends." ( i neglected to add when i originally wrote this that this dictum is true of every hegemonic culture...you, as an individual, have value in their eyes only in so far as you serve their ends...if you aren't a minion you'd better be self-validating ) and in so doing lenin beget stalin. they knew what history's final end was...anything they did to reach it was acceptable.

it just drones on

i heard a piece on the bbc this morning about general atomics...industry leader in drone manufacturing whose pr people do not like te moniker "drone"...it is redolent of male bees who have a reputation as mindless drudges ( a concept pertaining to males that seems to be readily applied across species by some...but we verge on political incorrectness here..back to the lead-lined personal journal with that )and so implying that the targeting done by said drones is somewhat less than fail-safe at best ( one would need to ask a pakistani in the tribal area bout the efficacy of targeting...and one wonders what the federal response would be to say chinese drones in u s airspace...but, once again, we venture into waters bound to be offensive to some )...so general atomics wants us to call them something like "remotely operated aircraft" so the name can pass into the realm of bureaucratic euphemism and obfuscation and the "special vocabulary" that dulls the discourse...control the language and you frame the debate...goebbles understood this and so do his heirs..of course general atomics calls their drones "the predator' and "the reaper" which immediately calls the entire project into serious question...obamaland called them drones in his state of the union message...if it is good enough for the commander-in-chief then who am i to question it? drones it is.