boscohorowitz
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The How Time Flies link opens at the wrong place. Stupid robots. You want to start at 4:45.
Rebot redux:
No way it wasn’t robotic error. It’s not like I’m not high. *snigger*
Having grown up in the post-WWII New Deal era, turning 13 when men walked — nay, pogo-hopped! –on the moon, when the counter-culture zenithed at Woodstock (only to, of course, drown in that success amid the complacent 70s), and perhaps most importantly to me back then, young women began venturing about braless while the smog visibly lessened from new environmental regs we foolishly thought would stay, two years before Nixon axed the gold standard (“I am not a crook! I GAVE it away!”), R. Buckminster Fuller was in full prominence amid stunning images of Terra from Luna, I naturally formed a liberal bias in my politics. Putting aside details, you were kinda dumb not to, for it had been liberals who, since the Depression, had been the recognized voice of fixing the problems created by progress driven by sad old same old human nature.
Never mind political realities and machinations, in terms of the general zeitgeist you were a sucker at that time to believe the post-WWII/Cold War corporate job for life/atomic power too cheap to meter zeitgeist.
Just like you would’ve been a sucker not to support the French Revolution despite how predictably human the results of that was too.
That beautiful first half 20th Century Modern Era USA is King thing (king both morally, financially, and most of all, financially and entertainingly) was picking up the thrown retreads of its excess success (too much of anything will kill you),blowing out left and right, veering all over the road.
What had once been liberalism was now the new conservatism. Mainstream. America loves a winner, and it was Dems in charge who’d won WWII (along with first of all working hard to make sure it happened and on their terms), so it took the general who’d won that war, likable Ike, to oust the increasingly war-hungry Dems who’d placated Depression Era anxiety with a ton of good old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus spending, most of it pretty savvy since this was when building dams and similar infrastructure was the smart thing to do, all that sweet cheap stratospheric REOI oil digging up and smelting the best mineral deposits we’ll ever see in this country outside of year 2100’s Best of the Best landfills (“Turning yesterday’s toxins into today’s Necessities”).
But by 1952 and Truman’s disaster after disaster, beginning with that disturbing image of us performing municipal nuclear genocide on two cities after already fire-bombing Tokyo, a fate that in the short run was perhaps more gruesome than Hiro-Saki, then continuing and concluding through more of the same but sans nukes to North Korea (Shoa offs!), it was time for nominal conservatism to get some of the action. It was just more of the same neo-fascism the Dems sold, but… churchier, with nice sensible shoes, and a healthy dislike of taxation with or without representation.
No one was really questioning the status quo, just doing some interior re-decoration.
But a few sock hops and shotgun weddings later, raw rebellion got above my generation’s pelvis, JFK was inspiring — then murdered and therefore martyred into a kind of sainthood, the Viet Nam war couldn’t control the media or its veterans enough to keep our de facto imperial fascism rolling anymore, we’d read Silent Spring, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, seen the movies King of Hearts and Lawrence of Arabia, heard civil right’s roar and watched LBJ’s dick-wrangling of Congress to pass some great social justice/welfare* legislation (whereupon he turned over and screwed IT in the ass too, cuz sticking his dick in often unwilling things is about all he knew how to do), rivers were on fire, and everyone in my childhood Chicago knew the air stank worse and worse all the time… popular political reality, the one that the moods of the masses follow, was in a period of acknowledging more sanely than not the nature of the messes it had made.
[ *let’s reclaim that word from its vernacularization into ‘pandering freebies’ back to the proper :common good”, eh? ]
Making good remedy, of course, was an entirely different story, but hey, we’re human beings. Fucking up is our middle name despite our brilliant mutations now and then.
We’d wasted too much of the Enlightenment’s/New World’s new tools and resources already to fix things via our usual erratic cultural migrations. We needed to get everything right 90% plus to survive the dilemmas of Post-Modernism (I hate the term too but it semiotically captures its essence of too lame to earn a name, too abstruse to decipher and too boring/horrifying when one does bother). 51-49% (our typical winning streak) wouldn’t do, and 51-49% would compound like interest into a seriously negative asymptote like the one “Tyler Durden” of Zero Hedge uses as his title quote.
Fast forward through ye olde Hegelian epicycles in democratic miniature from liberal backlash to conservative backlash to liberal BL to conservative BL to LBL to CBL to… each backlash bearing less resemblance to its label than before, each lash being weakening limp plebiscite wrist flickers for/against the Lesser Lib/Con Evil, and here we are.
Like Captain Kangaroo’s obvious grandfather said:
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”
― G.K. Chesterton
ck:
gk:
When I started educating myself after rather wild and crazy young adult years, the conservative voice who had as profound an effect on my thinking as, say, Noam Chomsky or Hunter Thompson, was this guy here:
The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk
Being a Xtian, I am inherently liberal but, being a Xtian, I am also inherently conservative. Not because the Bible tells me so, but because human reality has shown itself to be incapable of fulfilling Enlightenmental secular humanism just as the mythical Middle Easter forebears, Adam and Eve, couldn’t begin to handle the challenge of higher reflective consciousness. Too much too soon, which is an apt description of humanity since Enlightenment re-opened Pandora’s Box. Man discovers fire, man burns planet.
Like that E.O. Wilson quote Raul shared awhile back.
I have no faith in any strategy or camp of either political label to do any good. Liberalism’s ideals are generally superior but its faith that science can bell the cat has proven to be what Dr. D calls Anti-Logos. We can’t help it. We’re way too stupid to be so smart, and language allows morons to possess technology created by geniuses. Not good.
I am a Xtian a) because I’m desperate, which is how it should be, no shame, and b) read loosely, shall I say liberally, as I believe it should be read, the Bible (and other religious codices from ancient past) make for me the best sense of why we’re the way we are. But that’s a very long story. I’ve camped most of my life with atheists and agnostics, worship Nabokov and Borges and Stanislaw Lem and such, enjoyed and endorsed Dawkins’ work outside his shrill autistic denunciation of magical thinking, don’t for a second believe that believing in God makes it so (although I will entertain the quantum woo notion that God is perhaps a self-recycling feedback loop of belief in such an entity and the accompanying idea that the universe has sound good benevolent reason, that we must keep clapping if we want Tinker Belle not to die), and don’t think that Jesus or Abrahamic religionism in general is the only true strain… but will indulge the notion that when Jesus said He was the Only Way and all that, it was something unique among whatever relations and effects upon us in this little cosmos may supernally exist. A path He’d personally carved out because He felt sorry for us recycling samara or karma through dharma or whatever that stuff is called. Not necessary, per se, but taking responsibility for the mess His Daddy, one demiurge rung up the ladder, has made of evolving life on Terra into something mostly good with just enough bad to pay back entropy.
The idea being that when we do that life review thing so many NDEs report, we have supernaturally powerful compassion by which to forgive ourselves when the Big Screen shows us how much our petty selfish blind actions hurt so many many many sentient creatures, some of them human. That we don’t voluntarily cast ourselves into some lake of fire, i.e., back to the old recycling of consciousness through samsara. Only logical use of crucifying a Son of God that I can think of.
Whatever gets you through the night, as John Lennon sang with nice enough lyrics but really atrocious music (he folded fast, musically, without Paul always humming pretty tunes into the air, although he was conceptually pretty brilliant).
Speaking of John, who else has notices the downright inane paradox of the opening line of Imagine?
Imagine there’s no heaven (aka imaginary place).
Indeed. Imagine you’re not imagining. That roomful of infinitely receding mirrors can be yours too if you meditate a few thousand lifetimes. The Bible says, “Be still and know that I am God.” I find that much easier than trying to envision emptiness, that is, to comprehend raw consciousness directly in some way.
Throw in the prospects of a benevolent afterlife where souls are revealed in loving essence (quite commonly reported in NDEs, which have happened to two people close to me), and I am seduced thereby to hang my hopes and faith on those silly old post-tribal myths.
I go now to gaze into my crystal and channel the spirits of ancient Atlantis, for lo, I am stoned.\
P.S. from this perspective, I can see why some people are so enamored of Donald, even knowing he’s a despicable heel. Sometimes it takes a blind wannabe Samson (vain arrogant SOB) to bring down the temple.
Me, I think of my fave Al Sharpton election slogan (my own personal apocryphy): Vote for Al! He can’t fuck up things any worse than they already are, and who knows, he might stumble into something good for us! What the hell, eh?
Lousy slogan but he was a lousy candidate.
Alas, as a Xtian I can neither enjoy the thrills of hating him as so many do, nor worshipping him as many others seem to. I have to see him as a sick old homo sapiens like me, and forgive him for being fucked up. Hating on him is like yelling at my own shit. And since the segue exists, I’ll take it: impeaching him is like flushing a bucket of crap down a toilet you know is clogged. Gonna backfire.
““The Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust (WS)”
They act like this matters. The whole point was to turn borrowed Fed money into oil. The companies went bankrupt? The “company” is a fiction. It’s a bunch of words on paper, nothing happens when you tear the paper. However we got real oil for a bunch of hot air clicking mice on a pixel. Sounds like a win, not a loss.”
It’s a loss. We’ll need that oil later on, even at the low REOI yields it gives. Russia benefitted because it can sell at those prices and still come out ahead on the financial ledger while not trashing aquifers, public trust, the will of the capitlist community to invest in it down the road when it would make financial sense (after the petrodollar has collapsed and we can’t afford tobuy foreign oil).
For Harry’s Uncle A. WHom I seem bent on calling Henry not Harry.
Methinks that FP (Former not Fresh Prince) Henry’s time in Afghanistan gave him reasons to reconsider his ties to the crown. He looks good in that photo with Bruce. Like he’s finally his own man. Good on ye, Hank.
As is kinda obvious by now, sometimes I post a song that has barely even nominal relation to a topic siomply because I feel it deserves more audience. This song — and this p[articular performance — are, imo, staggering:
“Us old farts grew up eating dirt, worms, and handling all forms of reptiles, amphibians, insects, dogs, cats, and pet rats, mice, and hampsters. Then eating our sandwhiches, fruits and what have you, all without washing our hands.”
Yes and no. My parents were the first generation to have public hygiene taught in school. Washing hands is good. But disinfecting entire living areas, treating germs as if they were alien conquerors from outer space in some Lovecraft story, that has made us very susceptible indeed.
10-20 years or so, everyone’s gonna be wearing habibs, I suspect.
“The decades of forced vaccinations have had a negative effect on our immune systems, IMO.”
Aye. And then, when we eradicated in the will all smallpox, it turns out we cleverly kept them alive in various gubmint labs just waiting for some terrorist ass to blow it up after several generations have developed, collectively speaking, less resistance.
It’s not like humanity knows wehat it’s doing or anything. It just does stuff, period,
“Pre-Aqua-Net Big Hair”
SOmeone will name their band this before the next decade arrives, I predict.
MInor correction: Trump lies more than anyone I’ve encountered except maybe a gubernatorial candidate for Washington state circa 2000, but he does it so much it’s obvious.
Obama, alas, was really really good at it. Little shit.
“Looks like maybe Jimmy or Clark?”
JImmy Stewart, bless his honorable soul.
“As for Trump appearing, I believe Obama paved the way with his “Change You Can Believe In” slogan. He failed to deliver any change except to further insitutionalize the corruption, a Chicago style!”
Aye, major conservative/indie backlash. I don’t think Trump can begin to damage the republic as much as Obama did, cuzs Obama lied so much more and so much more persuasively than Dubya or Clenis or… have to go back to Reagan, maybe, for a more disillusiooning glibster.
“That Calhoun dude has little fingers and hands. Not a farmer.”
Aye. He was a plantationer. His job was to over overseers to make sure they made the slaves performed as expected.
V.Arnold: I have HHT. Genetic. My body makes lousy capillaries. Mine is relatively mild, meaning that I just get bad nosebleeds very often. They require me to shove big old wads of kleenex up the offending nostril. That places gobs of pressure on one of the three main blood flow regulators feeding the brain. I can feel the correlative part of my brain go wonky from it, and it inflicts major vicious depressions that only weed or opiates alleviate, and I’m tired of both of them, so I have finally learned to stay clean.
During periods of frequent heavy bleeding, I go seriously anemic real fast, which also creates a form of major depression.
But I was a self-pitying fool long before the HHT began manifesting around age 30. 😉 And now I have a groovy new word to use to express my woe: cerebral perfusion.
Since I can’t sing like this guy, words like cerebral perfusion are how I impress the ladies with my sorrowful state:
When Music Spoke Straight to the Heart
I got no complaints. No one’s murdered my kin, and I was phuysically pretty vigorous until 2003 or so when it kicked in hard. Used to climb mountains and such. But I do have on major complaint: it sucks to start bleeding all over your wife whiole we’re having sex. Kinda ruins dah mood.
Sing wid me now:
‘We seem determined to trigger a major extinction event/evolutionary overhaul, and global climate change is proving an insufficient means of diong this. ‘
I misspoke, as the senators say. What I meant to convey is that it isn’t happening fast enough to suit our obsession with hurtling ourselves into oblivion.
Obviously a madman, but madman often see things most don’t. Even in defending slavery, Calhoun showed the traps that “the North” (to apply a very crude and overly broad label) was leading us into.
Plus, I was born in South Carolina and know the culture well. Have a soft spot for Southern madmen, I does.
Oh, one last thing. Before I take heat for or am dismissed because of quoting Calhoun and deeming him “wise”, please note I also called him a roaring madman. Being raised the son of a slave-holding household generally inflicts social madness on a person.
His argument that slavery was a “positive good” was as specious as the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of men being born equal with certain inalienable rights. Men are born into what they are born into, period, and no two humans are equal. Ignoring these truths have given us the uber-divisive identity politics of today which prevent people from taking genuine common cause against their elite oppressors, and instead have them squabbling over relatively minor privileges.
Any man who would order a man whipped because he ran away from bondage to seek his own fortunes, even as a penniless fugitive, deserves to be whipped in kind and then FORCED into fugitive exile.
Not by some almight social institution but by someone who actually gives a good goddam, a kind of person seemingly in short supply. But ’twas ever thus.
“What’s the idea, bore the Senate into submission?”
I did a quick google of “Weimar Republic boring”. First result was a 2017 article from Foreign Affairs magazine with the title:
“Why Does Germany Have Boring Politics?
Good Institutions Thwart Radicalism”I doubt the article is worth reading except as a possible source of previously unknown details. Certainly not for its conclusion as stated in its headline.
Radicalism is of course deemed bad almost universally even as we almost always applaud our given nations’ founding motherfuckers (I don’t want to indulge the sin of patriarchic chauvinism, so I chose a multi-gender term) for being radical enough to create a polity we could then attempt to sustain.
Boring breeds lack of involvement, which the elites always prefer. Rabble-rousing is considered a bad thing, but who defines who is/isn’t rabble? Deplorables on the right, snowflakes on the left. How dare members of a democratic republic enjoy universal adult suffrage? Don’t we know that those people are wrong or too dumb to know the difference between wrong and right? Right? (ahem) I said, “RIGHT?!?” Agree with me or I’ll socially belittle you, you deplorable snowflake twitter-pates.
I’m onboard with Dr.D. that work is what makes human reality, for good or ill. (I remind us that work is not innocent. Work is always about exploiting resources some other critter, human or other, needs to not watch its offspring starve.) …[pause to read a text from someone Working with Bernie to build a coalition or something. deleted]
Work is what primarily interests us. Work is how we learn. Play, btw, is hard work to attain a preferred state of experience.
I’ve often derided libertarianism for being a bunch of, to quote dear old Russell Kirk, “chirping secretaries”, but that’s only in relation to modern mass vote partisan politics.
As a basic personal political philosophy (and those radicals were right: politics is personal or else it’s merely oppression) libertarianism is the only sane political concept I know of. Libertarianism is based on the concept of work, and people tend to respect things they’ve worked for more than things taken for granted including those specious notions that all men are created equal and possess certain inalienable rights. Was it Carlyle or roaring old madman Calhoun who dismissed those lines as bunk? I agree. Saying a thing is doesn’t make it so although saying it often enough tends to convince people it is say if one says so.
( John C. Calhoun aka Jubilation T. Cornpone )
Everyone has to fight to be free, said some Tom Petty dude. Freedom is a constant struggle, I recall chanting at a political rally marching across the Golden Gate bridge led by Angela Davis (very distinguished and elegant person, as I recall, who smoked a meerschaum pipe and dressed with dignified flair). Being dedicated to said premise, i.e., personal liberty, I couldn’t stick with the chant, which in entirety was ‘Freedom is a constant struggle, free the six now!’ (the six being political prisoners of the place/era) and replaced my contribution with ‘Fucking is a constant hard-on, fuck a duck now!’.
Bored people tend to be compliant and docile… until they either grow too bored and try to ‘improve the system’ (rather like prisoners voting for new guards or something) or their rulers fuck up so much (as they inevitably do) that the rabble is roused to do something, usually worse than what their leaders inflicted but oh so much more interesting, it requiring actual work to be part of a revolution or such.
Methinks this shrill Mr. Schiff might bore the Senate into something very dangerous: taking serious action.
But we live in exciting times — when we’re not too bored to pay attention, that is.
Sorry to be such a blatherer today, Raul. I was up most of the night with unpleasant aspects of a rare medical condition that, among other things, does wonky things to the blood supply to my brain that leave me too mentally weak to put all this graphomania to proper work: a novel I threaten to finish someday. (Ye bin worned.) So, like many scopundrels, I scurry to that last refuge: political discussion.
I find it interesting that USA went off the gold standard (August 1971) 8 months after France made its first successful launch of a nuclear sub-launched nuclear-capable ICBM.
It’s a nuclear arms RACE. Races are contests where people win and lose. This is one where every reaches the finish line and nobody wins.
From the The End of U.S. Military Dominance: Unintended Consequences Forge a Multipolar World Order article posted by John Day:
“While Iran does not want war, any pursuit of a nuclear arsenal may guarantee a conflagration in the Middle East. But I have long maintained that the risk of a nuclear war (once nuclear weapons have been acquired) does not exist, with them having a stabilizing rather than destabilizing effect, particularly in a multipolar environment.”
This a highly rational argument that, alas, presupoposes highly rational behavior by people in power. I’m reminded of that good ol boy golem, Alan Greenspan, speaking of “irrational exuberance” tearing down what little sanity there ever was in 20th century banking capitalism.
The Roman elites found it not too difficult to destroy their empire even when glaringly faced with the overhwhelming folly of their actions. When you get that many nascissistic sociopaths in charge, one of them’s bound to be a thanatosic lunatic. Add to this our growing disoposition to entrust necessary functions to jittery kludged software programs distributed over a global communications network and another simple fact: any weapon humanity makes, humanity uses.
Anyone looking at the historical facts concerning the USA’s use of atomic bombs on Hiro-Saki will see that it was a lunatic decision based on power-mad paranoiac arrogance. Of course we would not maintain our nuclear monopoly. Of course we would soon be positioned on a thermonuclear precipice. Of course we would continue our delusional arrogance with insane notion like Star Wars defense (Hollywood is such a great sales tool for the crackpots in charge).
Right now, Russia is an uncommonly sane nation, having learned bitter lesson from a century-plus of political insanity. Right now, Putin is firmly in charge, and Putin is that rare thing: a benevolent dictator, the only sane governance humanity has known since it invented the concept of soldiery. Right now, Russia’s military sup[remacy is so great that it would require a Hillary Clinton with a much higher IQ to get the Pentagon to go ballistic (ah, the cliche’ expression returns to its nuclear roots), and I say this knowing that Domninionists have deeply infested our military establishment. (Their vision of starting Armageddon features the West winning, which is currently impossible, and even they can recognize primal impossibility… I think.)
But all this will change, yea, rapidly. We seem determined to trigger a major extinction event/evolutionary overhaul, and global climate change is proving an insufficient means of diong this. Meanwhile, all the major asteroids seem unwilling to actually hit our planet.
I simply cannot imagine us not engaging in at least a “limited nuclear exchange” (charming phrase) before this century is over, probably before it even reaches middle age. Right now, it’s still a toddler, and toddlers are notoriously solipsistic.
Yes, realist geoplolitical theory says that militarily balanced hegemons don’t directly attack each other, but instead chew up smaller nations in proxy wars, and so things like MAD provide stability. But said theory also says that such stabilities are fleeting and when they lapse, all hell breaks loose.
The myth of Eden and the myth of Pandora’s Box share wisdom we can understand but not employ.
I’ve shared this before. I share it again:
Nuclear Testing fromm 1945-1998
Just leave it on in the background. Like popcorn in the microwave, it will tell you when to pay attention.
Oh, Dimitri, I am so sorry for the wound of your loss. I have nothing to offer but a few words in e-text, but they are deeply sincere. I have a favorite niece and her murder would make me want to drown her murderers in my tears.
The cartoon may be corny, but Congress as an outboard motor is a charming image. PLus, as corniness goes, one has to admire the sun rising outof Donald’s combover.
One thing I enjoy about the big GOP political stars in post-Nixon America is their colorfulness. While the DNC mostly selects college-stamped smart-mouth sociopaths like Clinton and Obama, the GOP gave us senile Reagan (“It’s morning in America again”), entertainingly dyslexic Dubya, and blatantly Narcissistic Personality Disordere-d Trump. (I don’t give Poppy the time of day. A miscreant footnote best forgotten.) Biden is the most entertaining chump the DNC has proffered in awhile, but that lizard-lipped smile and those robotically twinkling eyes ruin the punch line.
I want to see a deep-faked video of Carl Sagan as Bernie Sanders going on and on about billions and billions and billions and billions… of billionaires, apparently.
The 30-seconds or so of the likes of Adam Schiff that I’ve witnessed is like watching sock puppets with laser eyes read from the phone book (do they still make those things?) as if it were the Book of Revelations. Nancy used to be entertaining simply because I thought she was kind of hot, but even my inane prurience can’t see her in a sexy light anymore and gawdamighty is she dull to listen to.
I miss Ted Cruz, Man of a Thousand Faces, whom I’d predicted back around 2013 would be our next president but, lacking as I did the ability to understand that America wanted someone REALLY batshit crazy, didn’t see Trump coming until msNBC et al made sure I saw him a thousand times a day, whereupon it was easy to see he’d win once it became clear that the DNC had made Bernie an offer he couldn’t refuse. Ted was very entertaining.
My old man was a fireman on Chicago’s Southside. When MLK was murdered, I didn’t see him for 3?-4?-5? days (I was maybe 12 at the time) as he fought the fires that burned for, like, a week after his assassination. (The south<>southwest horizon was fire orange for many nights, as I recall.) He was first generation Irish-American, the child of poor Irish immigrants who died by the time he was ten. Had a rough childhood, was a cryptographer in the Pacific Theater of WWII in the closing days (he probably processed cables relating to Hiro-Saki). He was all about the flag and the wonders of modern factory wages, etc. Standard issue New Deal conservative aka Silent Majority.
He spoke disparagingly of “do-gooder bleeding heart liberals”, often reminded me that “the squeaky wheel gets the oil”, said that MLK got what was coming to him for being a troublemaker. He was hardly a creature of what is commonly called ‘the Left’. (But he supported black men as fire fighters once Affirmative Action opened the door. He spoke reverently of Dudley, his first fire-fighting colleague even though he dismissed most Negroes (is still a proper and respectful designation, fashions be damned: if it was good enough for MLK, it’s good enough for me) as “spooks” and “rugheads”. Complicated person. Ain’t we all?
But when Carter was running for president, he said, “The country needs this man. (I agreed and still do.) When Reagan was running, he said, “This man scares me. He seems to actually believe the bullshit coming out of his mouth.”
Last time I saw him, 1997, he spoke very bitterly of how Clinton had ruined what was left of this country (and I tend to agree with him). As the internet mainstreamed, he said, “No way I’ll do that. I value my privacy too much.” As a former cryptographer, he understood that no code is uncrackable.
I think he would’ve been very much for Obama — until Obama’s notorious Senate vote to implant data transponders in the national rectum, while McCain would’ve given him severe gastrointestinal distress. I suspect he’d have been for Ron Paul after that. As for whom he’d have finally voted for, I wonder if he would’ve made his first ‘protest vote’ (because he strongly believed one must vote). I can hear him muttering something about being unable to smell any lesser evil among the turds presented by the duopoly.
I’m sure he would’ve dismissed Dubya as a lying weasel (true) and Gore as a lying android (true). He would have seen Trump for the shyster Trump is but, considering the alternatives (Lindsey Graham, the closet queen Boy Scout wafting Barney Fife cologne; Marc Rubio, the Catholic choir boy pimp; some family nimrod named Jeb; the afore-mentioned Cruz — that was a very entertaining cavalcade of clown car enthusiasts, that 2016 GOP primary), and in light of Trump’s obvious lack of affiliation with the duopoly farce, I suspect he’d have voted for Trump, kind of like how you dynamite a well to get things flowing again.
Ah, the good old days. Now we have a flabby Weimar republic redux and a shadow puppet Hitler who, Lord bless his petulant ass, learned from Hitler what Hitler didn’t learn from Napoleon and the British Empire: don’t fuck with Russia.
I’ll take what I can get. While I very much doubt Trump will be impeached, and suspect he will be re-elected, it terrifies me to think of the consequences of a successful impeachment and the horrors of whomever our paraschizoid plebiscite might allow to take charge of their Thorazine distribution network aka the USA gubmint.
A song to honor the impeachment circus:
“The left hates MLK sooooo much”
A) Yeah, let’s spout off-the-wall opinion as if it were fact, and B) promote even more divisiveness than already exists.
There is no more left any more than there is a right. There are just opposing camps based on how easily they can agree on who to blame, ruthlessly exploited by the usual divide’n’conquer schmucks.
We’re intelligent people here. We don’t need color-coded labels to tell us who to blame. Especially in a forum where most everyone agrees that such labels are useless not only as valid definitions but that the partisan groups stuck with those labels are at best willfully deluded sheep and at worst lying shitsticks.
If venting spleen solved anything, we would have cnquered the cosmos long ago.
Oh, I almost forgot: the photograph gracing this post’s header is… I rarely encounter art that stuns me with its newness and effectiveness. I’m hardly a connoisseur of art photography, but I think this is the single best such work I’ve seen. It works in so many ways on so many levels. I’ve made it my desktop background.
“Maybe this climate shit is just a way to soothe everyone’s feelings about the throw-away world we now live in!”
It keeps our mind off nuclear missiles, trashed aquifers, the looming post-anitibiotics plague, runaway population explosion, topsoil erosion and farming based on constant applications of poison, and so on. Plus, it comes from the sky, this clkimate stuff, and the sky has always dominated our thoughts as clueless cosmic orphans wondering how we got here.
“As Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren squabble for position and too often, reduce the meaning of life to a barren economic populism, Dr. King reminds us that U.S. society is a moral disgrace and we need a revolutionary movement to challenge its “racism, militarism, poverty, and materialism.”
‘barren economic populism’. Well said. Bravo.
“Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
The view from atop the mountain is ofetn misleading despite its panoramic perspective revelation. Racial strife is poised to become worse than ever. But nonetheless, the sky light is brilliant above the valley fog, and it gives courage to those who seek it.
Thanx for disinterring the memory of MLK from the trivial shroud it has been wrapped in, Raul. He looks good in that freshly pressed dark suit.
Hardly Stevie’s best song, but far from bad:
The real delusion amid all of this is our quaint delusion that we can find political solutions to our problems. Politics are the problem. Politics is our spurioous belief that we can cooperate in groups larger than those in which we can find and personally kick the ass of the motherfucker with whom we disagree.
Yes, I know, we’re doomed to be political. Which is why you can drop the last three words off the previous sentence.
Do it yourself or so without.
Nothing like picking on the kids who have to live through the shit we left for them.
Sure, solar/wind has been turned from a useful adjunct to a scam. It’s what we do.
But kids like Greta have grown up facing a very bleak future, with climate change as the worst prospect currently in their minds.
And we put them there.
Nopt sure who’s the idjit: the angry but misinfirmed kids or the adults who call them idjits for being understandably freaked out.
Thanx, WES< for demonstrating why humanity won’t fix the problems it creates.
We’d rather gather at perceived territorial boundaries (these days more virtual than not such as ideological boundaries) and fling p[oo.
Like I said, they’re gonna start killing old people soon. Why should political, religious and ethnic terrorists have all the fun?
One can see why zerosum recommends keeping an ample supply (OD-plus strength, I assume) at hand these days.
***
Obviously, wind power is useless when it comes to reliably pushing electrons around a power grid so we can all have hot running water, easy heat, and magic light switches. But it would be useful, very useful, for pumping water up and around, which would be one less odious drudgery for we modern humans to revert to.
Solar power is also useful for lotys of things, but again, not maintaining az power grod.
Power grids? Great for fooling billions of people into thinking that the future will be about atomic power “too cheap to bother to meter” and flying go-carts (next year’s big Xmas gift spectacular. Great for removing any sense of realistic energy use expectations from several generations of humans who now are taught to believe that the answer is magical robot cars and information somehow being the basis for an economy.
Basically, a giant homo rodentia mouse trap, them power grids. But everyone is so used to them that my kids, back in the day, could never master the art of turning lights and tvs and whatnot off even though I taped by every light switch a sign that said LIGHTS ON/LIGHTS OFF.
We has met the enemy and it are us. Anyone wanna fight? How about to the death, for food? Like maybe the loser’s carcass. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s call each other names just because we don’t have, in our mid-teen years, the wisdom of a middle-aged adult.
From 1999. Seems relevant here:
Hindemith is a good friend of mine. His music is a note of faith for contemporary Teutonicism; in Hindemith we had at least one modern German composer who wasn’t lyrically disemboweled by obsessive concepts of German music’s grandiose role in Western musical history and thereby compelled to deliver the Next Big Thing.
Serialism as a major development in classical music was tantamount to rap’s replacement of singing with yakking. Serialism well symbolizes the culminative nadir of Enlightenment/Progress’s zenith. This zenith/nadir oxymoron is my pretentious way of implying that, at the height of the Modern Age in the 20’s and 30’s, when a chicken in every pot and a metropolis for every person were hailed as the century’s birthright and gift to humankind, the living arts were extrapolating these principles to their inevitably absurd conclusions. Cubism, tone rows, antiliterature: the most brilliant talents of their respective disciplines were driven by the ethos of the time to create art that sang, spoke and displayed the approaching doom. The gloom was not only superficially evident in the results but intrinsically hardwired in their underlying methodologies: randomly selected tone sequences; vivisectionist methods of visual depiction; trivialization of semantic intention and content (whether deliberate, as Gertrude Stein, or unintentional, as James Joyce).
This is NOT to say that all, or even most, of the art was bad. Au contraire. Even the leaders (worst perpetrators), the Picassos and Schoenbergs and Steins, produced some wonderful stuff despite using the aforementioned morbid techniques. These artists were, after all, the very best of the best. What this IS to say is that the last fin-de-siecle crowd’s attempts to go beyond and break through to the next level, while thoroughly successful, could only bring them to the logical conclusion of these attempts: they smashed through the walls to find themselves in the Postmodern Wasteland, creating works that were the artistic equivalent of cut&burn rainforests, nuclear winters, invisible corporate tyrannies: giant deformed hothouse flowers fertilized by dead children and extinct species.
Some of these pieces were intriguing monkey puzzles and interesting anagrammatic labyrinths and any of a number of admirably clever constructs – but in their pastoral scenes the birdies didn’t twitter or flutter, although their mechanical analogs managed to cry and twitch, and in their poems the nearest Garden of Eden was in the spiral fronds of neighboring galaxies.
<end>Apparently, people are willing to listen to this enough to have made it famous. MId-20th Century Euromerica was a funny place.
It hardly matters who did/didn’t fudge this/that data regarding climate dynamics. Arguing it yea/nay only feeds the beast.
What matters is that we have 7 going on 8 billion people, nearly all of them convinced that they deserve the obscenely extravagant and ultimately ridiculous lifestyle pioneered in Euromerica. Not only does this drive our capitalistic economy engines to extract every damn valuable thing they can in order to make (new! improved!) Smart Pet Rocks, now with enhanced privacy intrusion, but also, in doing so we systematically destroy the planetary ecosystem, one that has evolved over billions of years with recurrent restarts via comets and other disruptions, one we understand so little that we can argue if the destruction is happening even as we watch it happen. (We’re kind of cognitively cross-eyed, we homo saps.)
What matters is that even if the current climate fluctuations are “normal”, they’re happening to 7-plus billion people dependent on ever more energy to live, especially since any reversion to more primitive lifestyles is at best going to be very painful for an enormous number of people, and at worst, impossible.
What matters is that few people will voluntarily do without in order to make do with less, which is the only sane option we have before us, and so we’ll fight viciously and, for the most part, indiscrimately, over the dwindling cornucopia become wasteland.
The last Dust Bowl affected far less people than such a thing would today. Worse, no one has a farm to go bgack to. It is false reassurement to point out that we have seen major climate disruption occur before things like anthropgenic climate disruption were a twinkle on a young climatologist’s master thesis title page. Yeah, we know big bad weather events happen without human intervention. This is ancient history. That this is so doesn’t negate the possibility that we’re winding up the global climate dynamo even crazier with our cute concepts of Enlightenment Modernist progress. The fact that we’re naturally about due for a repeat of previous climate changes (if that facet of natural history is determined to repeat itself again, which is not a foregone conclusion because predicting the future by the past has always been a dicey challenge) indicates that the global climate is more susceptible to alteration by human meddling than it would be during more stable periods in epochs past.
Meanwhile, we continue with the back-and-forth while the climate goes wonky. Everyone talks about carbon carbon carbon, apparently because that carbon offset number.a catchy little tune promising a relatively painless way for us to continue living swell while supposedly doing something significant to help our descendants deal with whatever mess we leave them (and anyone who challenges that we’ll leave them anything but a disaster has access to really good drugs that I want in on). But then, so does the concept of ignoring the fact that we were and are running out of energy relative to the human population growth potential before the concept of global climate disruption entered the vernacular. Rich elitist bastards make money selling carbon offset while other rich elitist bastards make money selling the notion that we should just continue drilling and mining and burning a buncha million years of solar energy concentrated into underground hydrocarbon sediments.
We’re in trouble regarding fossil fuels any way you look at it, and I don’t hear a single sane voiuce in any camp addressing the problem except those who recommend we start learning how to live without a power grid and factory farms.
Here’s a funny thought: the reason the fat cats are making money selling carbon offset bullshit is because the idea was already well-established among the majority climatology establishment and the Euromerican populace, while the concept of climate change denial by definition entered the race much later. The race has already been lost. That’s usually how it is with reactionary movements: they arrive too late because they’re reacting not proacting.
But then, it was a major reactionary who put the global wearming meme on the public news front page:
Madge, Coal, Climatology, Power Politics
But since we so insist on arguing whether anthropgenic climate disruption is happening:
Early global climate chanmge models mostly accurate per current measurements
No matter what one believes regarding climate and energy stocks, one is going to find going getting rougher, yea, much rougher, pert near soon.
Imo, the best thing you can do, Raul, is ignore the Thunberg phenomenon other than to note it as a signal that the kids are genuinely scared. Of course, anything allowed to make major media rounds will be co-opted by the moguls directing said media. Critiquiqing this infoscam only empowers it.
Greta has to work out her issues in her way, with or without a major media campaign behind her.
It’s not as if the media would allow genuine discussion of global energy/climate/environment issues of true merit. Even putting aside the rich bastards behind all this, the amount of cognitive dissonance alone will prevent humanity from facing up to the consequences of its collective action.
Your advice to Greta to go home and have a good time would, I am quite certain, only cause her even greater emotional discomfort than she already is experiencing. She has to follow her conscience, and it is obviously telling her to use her platform as best she can.
I applaud her determination and admire her for trying although I know she has even less chance of success than Jay Hanson did meeting with Congressional energy committees 20 years ago.
At least she hasn’t killed herself or a bunch of aging Boomers, something we’ll see younguns doing as times grow manifestly dire.
I never cared for the song but it seems appropriate here:
Also:
What Vietnam Vet said.
I don’t think we’ll be in Iraq and Syria much longer. Pretty sure our residual military presence in the ME will be limited to Saudi Arabia and it’s wee affilate states like the UAE and Qatar.
I want my kids to have 40 acres and a mule. Looks like we’ll have to have another Civil War first.
Meanwhile, hail Atlantis!
FInal comment from the youtube selection above:
“OBVIOUSLY patriarchal-heteronormative, sustainability-deficient speciesist binary non-intersectional alt-alt somethingphobic climate-change-denying migrant-hostile exploitational carbon-compromising aspects. Bury it with ALL truth.”
Not sure what he said but man, he sure nuff said it.
Don’t know when this number was released, so I can’t say if Eddie Harris influenced Luois or vice-versa.
Ever since we let armed brigades round us up into chain gang plantation workers (you know: “civilization”), we’ve had this thing for being ruled. If so, I vote we elect deSota. cuz man, can that cat grrove.
Bonus musical political commentary:
I suppose some would think the lyrics to both tunes are politically incorrect. As if politics could ever be correct.
