"will to affect the distant"

“in the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present. 'i am rising to the work of a human being. why then am i dissatified if i am going to do the things for which i exist and for which i was brought into the world? or have i been made for this, to lie in the bedclothes and keep myself warm'. but this is more pleasant, dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure and not all action and exertion? dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? and art thou willing to do the work of a human being and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to nature?" marcus aurelius__________________________ “western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. everyone demands something of the rest. we say "thou shalt" in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to that order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable...in the ethics of the west everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. here luther is completely at one with nietzsche, popes with darwininas, socialists with jesuits..." oswald spengler. decline of the west________________________ why would i be “dissatisfied”?...well…first of all no one has ever actually given me a final definition of what the “work of a human being” might be…there seem to be manifold definitions mostly engendered by those who believe that ”the efficacy of” and their “title to give, such orders is unshakable”…belief, like truth, is utterly subjective and entirely capable of being misplaced…from politicians to executives to the clerisy ( whether religious, academic, op-ed pundits, or any of a string of inane youtube “influencers” ) there are any number of the unshaken who believe they know how i should comport myself in the face of “the work of a human being” and i am forced to question exactly who might benefit most if i fall into line with their thinking…ozzie has a valid point about that “immense optical illusion” foisted on almost all of us…old marcus was, aside from a miserable stoic, the emperor of rome and one suspects that his “work of a human being” was to maintain and expand the privilege of himself and his bastions of hangers-on…so who benefitted most from his “work”?...when i clock in who is the winner?...i earn money and so gain access to goods and services…that is fact…and who benefits more from those transactions?...myself or the shareholders and top tier of the corporation?...i have my suspicions…I also have the numbers that confirm my suspicions…you could find an algorithm to do the ceo’s job at considerably less cost…we’re back to ozzie’s “thou shalt” delivered in imperious tones and backed up by a raft of specious reasoning from those theologians of greed called economists ( and let’s not leave out the clerisy )…so i awoke before the alarm went off this morning and as an act of defiance of the “system” and as a posthumous affront to the dead emperor and the entire , miserable stoic project ( an evasion of addressing life on all its levels and a philosophy that smacks of quietism on the best day it ever had…epictitus and that slum-lord seneca can get bent ) i shut it off before it went off and stayed “in the bedclothes to keep myself warm” for another hour…then i got up and took the dog out which was to the sole benefit of the dog and myself…that was reasonable “work of a human being”.

ideology masquerading as principle

ideology-n. a system of ideas or ways of thinking pertaining to a class or individual esp. as a basis for some economic or political theory or system, regarded as justifying actions and esp. to be maintained irrespective of events. the shorter oxford English dictionary

in an interview in the sunday new york times kevin d. roberts…head wonk at the heritage foundation, maintains the aim is to “institutionalize trumpsim”…this brings up a number of points…it would seem mr. Roberts has already elected don trump to a second term as president…and “trumpism” needs a definition…the first point is still moot and we actually have an answer to the second…the heritage foundation is involved in something called “project 2025” which is a conservative group bent on imposing their values despite what anyone else may think…they have produced a book titled “mandate for leadership: the conservative mandate”…a manifesto for the kulturkampf…a sample of the verbiage runs like this…”reducing the number of federal employees seems an obvious way to reduce the overall expense of the civil service, and many prior administrations have attempted to do just this. presidents bill Clinton and barak obama began their terns, as did ronald reagan and donald trump, by mandating a freeze on the hiring of new federal employees but these efforts did not lead to permanent and substantive reductions in the number of nondefense federal employees”…so the military and its enormous expense are inviolate…that is clear…what is not clear is why “prior administrations” failed to reduce the federal payroll…project 2025 does not stop to consider that you cannot administer a de facto empire with a small government…shades of grover nordquist and his desire to “drown” a shrunken federal government in a bathtub…so long as you are policing an empire you will have bureaucrats…my thoughts are they will simply be those infused with trumpist ardor if mr. Roberts has his way…and what does he see as “substantive”?...he ballparked 50,000 lost jobs and added that he wished the losers no harm and hoped they would thrive in the regular economy as old federal buildings were “repurposed” for commercial activities ( how much empty commercial space is there where you live? Good luck there kev )…”mandate for leadership” has fifteen chapters dealing with separate government agencies involved in regulatory activities and an outline for what to do with each…for health and human services for instance, “protecting, life, conscience, and bodily integrity: the secretary should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights [ “health and human services prohibits recipients of health and human services funds from discriminating against institutional and individual health care entities for their participation in, abstention from, or objection to certain medical procedures.” church amendments to the public health service act definition of “conscience rights”], and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.”…no more abortions and none of that transgender nonsense in a “trumpist” America…so in an 800 plus page ideological manifesto they dismiss current administration policy as “ideology”…of course they will call it “conservative principles” or “ faith-based beliefs”…that does not diminish it as ideological warfare on a national scale..

i have not finished perusing this and imagine there will be more overt self-deceit or, perhaps, it is simply an attempt to disguise scrapping what’s left of the constitution as some sort of return to morality…small wonder the fundamentalists are on board…and we will ( for now ) leave out the implications of kev’s stated desire to remove power from the bureaucrats and return it to congress…given the sclerotic state of that group of doctrinaire conspiracy theorists and wholly owned grifter criminals ( what was that twain said about congress? ) that cannot possibly bode well for the bulk of the polity…in fact I cannot see much of anything in these pages aimed at the actual wellbeing of the bulk of the population…a framework for government by the elite for the elite…which wouldn’t be much of a change actually…they simply don’t like the veneer of what passes for democracy in this country.

extra-judicial assassinations

all adolescents test boundaries...entitled ones moreso one suspects...someone needs to sit on this one...nixon's lawyers argued in open court in 1974 that the president was immune to prosecution for four years at a time no matter what he might do...of course that was an attempt to beat a conspiracy ( a both flexible and loaded word in today's political lexicon...ask the house of non-representatives ) to commit burglary rap...nixon never tried to kill anyone ( unless, of course, you count vietnamese )...the supreme court of the time rejected that bullshit unanimously...with the bench loaded with today's partisan yahoos who knows...they may just endorse dictatorship ( in the words of chamfort, "it's easier to make something legal than to make it legitimate " )...so navy seals as the hitmen of the executive branch? i am told that military personel swear to uphold the constitution which could be a sticky point for a literalist...unless, of course, you stack military leadership with loyalists and label your political opponents "enemies of the constitution"...then the military becomes the nkvd and absolutely no one is safe from denunciation as a maga heretic...this would lead to not just an expansion of detainment camps ( concentration would be, one imagines, strenuously avoided ) for undocumented immigrants but a general burgeoning of enclosures of barbed and razor wire ( electrified or not )...there is a subset of the polity that lust for an authoritarian government...either so they could be as violent as their nature dictates or stop thinking, take your pick ( or choose both )...and one has to wonder under what circumstances that wire might come down with "president for life" trump and his cadres in charge...it is going to be an interesting year ( or more )

the stench of yet another presidential year

“…the minority must surrender up their judgement and will to majority…private opinion must give way to public judgement…he must be a vain, conceited individual who can think himself capable as to judge of what is necessary for the support of government s those whom the nation has chosen & entrusted for that very purpose…it is the duty of the citizen to submit to it ( the majority ); and to give up his private sentiments to the public will…the false patriot is the man who willfully misrepresents his government ,and the conduct of its officers, or, without just cause, creates distrust and suspicion of the legislature, or the executive, or of the principle officers of the government, and openly opposes, or secretly foments and encourages opposition to the execution of the laws.” Supreme court justice Samuel Chase in a charge sheet to the grand jury investigating Thomas Cooper, editor of the Sunbury and Northumberland gazette for violation of the alien and sedition act of 1798 on 12 April 1800____________ Of course all this federalist flummery in favor of majority rule turned to abhorrence of mob rule when Jefferson won the 1800 election and set a president for whining political losers that has confused the electoral process since and has surely been in evidence over the last few years…if not since 2000…one can easily question the “public will”…stop and ponder on some of the people you know, and group-think ( politicians love a mass rally ) and in-group bias can easily be manipulated by a cadre of debased and lying political whores…no one is objective so setting an objective benchmark for political behavior has always been a problem…pragmatic naturalism ( have a shufti at pragmatism by William James, my copy is only 134 pages long ) is the quintessential American philosophy and that situational ethic says whatever works is good…so whatever it takes to win is ethical…ends justify means…and in the end Chase’s vaunted “public will” is secondary at best…whomever manipulates it most efficiently is the winner…buckle up people, things are getting more interesting by the minute.

mr. kissinger, him dead

and, as far as i am concerned, the world is a better place today...admittedly only marginally so since much of what this secretary of state, national security advisor, and war criminal did is still impacting the world...but the author is dead and good fucking riddance...instrumental in widening the war in vietnam into cambodia and laos and propagating nixon"s "madman theory"...backing genocidal campaigns by the pakistanis against the bengalis and the indonesian atrocities towards the east timorese...while i cannot find any direct evidence of his involvement in pinochet's coup against allende he did say before allende's election "the issues are too important for the chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves"...no arrogant or imperial thinking there...a power junkie who did not care what carnage his policies left behind as long as he won...the only positive thing i can thinkl of that he did was to accept nixon's resignation...

if i believed in hell i would suspect you could find henry in an inner circle...perhaps bunking with maggie thatcher and ayn rand...he deserves and obituary along the lines of the one h.l. mencken wrote for william jennings bryan https://www.reddit.com/r/saltyobituaries/comments/8p3ken/hl_mencken_in_memoriam_wjb_1925/

one third

"...no: it must be divided by a thick wall of dark nights from all return of light and sunshine, from the latter weeks of october to christmas eve, therefore, happiness is in season." thomas de quincey______tom had his own reasons for desiring long nights, however he is talking abour "event time" not "clock time" and it is the latter i am on about...(plus we could spend no small amount of time bogged down in the "whys" of tom's desire )...it is the artifical and abstract nature of the command and control mechanism of clock time that are at issue here...in terms of calenders, year and months might be more readily reconciled to event time...weeks, days, hours, minutes all function as behavioral regulators seeking to control events ( and people ) as opposed to the "it takes as long as it takes" viewpoint of event time...from chuirch hierarchies mandating specific prayers at specific times to the factory whistle, clock time tells you what to do and when...time zones are surely an artifical construct designed to aid in co-ordinating control...you have to know when the 12:01 express that originated at 12:01 in an other time zone is arriving...so time panders to the railroads...and, by extension, to capital...the international date line is simply time zones writ large and one wonders if its placement couldn't be as arbitrary as the time difference three feet in on each side of a line marking the beginning/end of a time zone...real time has little connection to clock time...time contracts with focused interest and expands with boredom...days can seem to drag on for eternities yet in agregate they fly by,...does sleep register time or are we outside it when asleep...when i of necessity set an alarm there are times when it wakes me, however i am usually awake before it goes off...internal colock or simply regular habits of sleep? i would opt for sleep faling under the rubric of event time...it takes as long as it takes and it can be readily disrupted...so why all this thought about the arbitrariness of clock time? well...always an interesting subject...however overnight tonight the hegemons are giving me back the hour the miserable chamber fo commerce stole last march...no they did not invent it...they certainly jumped on the bandwagon however...along with some of the clowns ( listening rubio? ) in whoretown who wanted to make daylight savings time permanent this year...they tried that with the permanent daylight savings time act of 1974 which was repealed relatively quickly when daylight became naturally shorter in the winter and the dark was disruptive...the whores have no feel for natural rhythms...or anything else natrual for that matter...so i get my hour back...however it is more like twenty minutes since i only get it back for a third of the year...let the natural rhythms begin.

freedom for whom and to do what?

"The parliamentary battle of the NSDAP had the single purpose of destroying the parliamentary system from within through its own methods. It was necessary above all to make formal use of the possibilities of the party-state system but to refuse real cooperation and thereby to render the parliamentary system, which is by nature dependent upon the responsible cooperation of the opposition, incapable of concerted action..."-ernst huber

yes, no one is ever safe when congress is in session, however the doctrinaire conspiriacy theorists in the house of representative bear an eerie resemblance to activites elsewhere in the early 1930s...disruptive at best and both profoundly vindictive and convinced of their almost papal infalibility they clearly think they have the answers we all need to align ourselves with and seem willing to utilize violence as a method of political debate...add in their unstinting support for a criminal presidential wannabe ( again ) and their authoritarian sub-text becomes unmistakeably highlighted...politics here has always been a vile business based mostly on lies and evasion coupled with periodic outbursts of violence...usually aimed at members of the working class attempting to organize to provide themselves with some protection against unrestrained capital...fascism is what capital turns to when it feels threatened from below and the worderfully orwellian euphemism this cacus's name presents should be a clue as to where their sympathies lie...nothing much new in this...the question is how to address it...they and their cadres in local government are doing their best to undermine the electoalr process by disenfranchizing sectors of the voting public that could elect representative inimical to their ends...gerrymandering ( a process named after elbridge gerry...one of those "founding fathers" conservatives are so in awe of )....one cogent step would be to refuse to remain quiet in the face of crypto-fascist machinations.