As The Cookie Crumbles: Fully Rigged

Unca Joe Stalin is reputed to have remarked that "Who votes doesn't matter; what matters is who COUNTS...votes."

There has been pretty good evidence gathered by the likes of the USer investigative journalist, Greg Palast, who writes for the Guardian in London, and a slew of indefatigable voters (BradBlog, et al) that USer elections have for some time been prey to, and have not infrequently been determined by election fraud.

Not voter fraud; not the efforts of single individuals to vote more than once. But the kind of manipulation which was probably determinative in the Presidential elections of 200 and 2004; but there is no reason in principle that it couldn't have happened at any time since votes have been electronically cast and/or counted...

Voting machines themselves have been so often so easily hacked that many States have gone back to paper ballots. I work as an election judge, and I've seen the precautions which now surround ballot security. There still remains that week link, to which Unca Joe alluded: the count.

In USer elections, overwhelmingly, ballots are TABULATED (i.e., "counted") by machines which read cards inscribed with votes at the voting machine. But the cards, the tabulators, and the soft-ware which directs the operatiuon of the tabulator are all PRIVATE PROPERTY, belonging to corpoRats which have vested interests in the outcomes of the processes they control, including the "proprietary" software which is illegible to ANYONE outside the company hierarchy.

But tainted machinery isn't the only way our elections are stolen.

The system is rigged in MANY ways, most of which are no more amenable to ready solution that those problems posed by the tabulators. But it's done by the same corpoRat interests. These typically begin long before the actual election season even begins:
First, since campaign fundraising success is considered a crucial metric of 'electability,' candidates must make themselves acceptable to corporate interests which account for more than 60% of all campaign contributions.

Next, once the candidate's acceptability is vetted, corpoRat interests impose restrictions on candidate access to the media and to participation in rituals like debates where name recognition is created...

Then, of course, Corporate media conduct and report exit polling, which can and probably has altered results, by creating a kind of media-induced voter suppression effect, inducing some voters to NOT venture to the polls. This happened, significantly, in the 1980 Presidential "contest."

And now, of course, there are the complications of corporate personhood and the legal determination that money equals speech, along with removal of restrictions on corporate campaign financing and lobbying freeing billions to buy our elected representatives.

Other interventions are more structurally intrusive. I've already discussed the manipulation of electoral structures and mechanisms. There is also the process called gerrymanering," the partisan redistricting, which re-draws electoral district maps that favor a particular party every decade. Recently there have been flurries of efforts in many States to manipulate boter ID laws that disenfranchise young, poor and minority voters, too.

In Florida, in 2000, and in (mostly mostly Democratic precincts) there were countless examples of fraudulent purging of voter rolls, including "caging" - removing a voter from the rolls or discarding their vote based on the return of direct mail to their listed address, a practice found to be used fraudulently and with racial bias, making it illegal under the Voting Rights Act. And of course, the disenfranchisement of felons, many poor, black or Hispanic, and convicted on drug offenses.

So, as the electoral season rolls inexorably upon us, those are the forces at work to disturb you and disrupt your vote, hippies.

Remember: Voting really IS the least you can do...We'll count 'em up when I see you at the beach.

As the Cookie Crumbles (12/23/11): The OTHER "Frac"

Intuitive engineering! Deterministic chaos in the sand!

Colleague Dr. Wombat and I were remarking on "fractals" and Mandelbrot sets earlier.

They're EVERYWHERE!

The dispersal of a given species of trees in a given forest will replicate the pattern of stems on a given branch which then replicates the branching structure of the leaf, etc; for instance.

Wombat noted noted that, once you notice them, you cannot ever again ignore them.

You cannot "unsee" them.

And what they suggest, in the strongest terms, is that Geometry is "God..."|

Humans have a word for it: "infinity"

But we don't really MEAN it.

"We" say "infinity," but we assume (deeply) there is some 'beginning' or some 'end.'

But infinity really is infinite. So there is, in principle, no END to the permutations of self-referential, self-organizing recurrence.

And the "universe" is no more, there is "multiverse."

UniverSES...Plural...Indeed, INFINIITE.

And none of them need resemble ours in the slightest; or some may, while others do not. Infinitely.(End Vid Here)

No, REALLY!


Something to think about at the beach, eh, hippies

Hippie News & Stuff (12/19/11): Con Con-Con

Every year PoliSci classes all over the country dispatch students to "ManInTheStreet" interviews with 'average citizens' who are presented with the Bill of Rights in modern language, and are then polled as to whether they'd approve that right in a NEW Constitution. I did it myself, both in High School and in college.

Students are often UNPLEASANTLY surprised to learn the average person will DECLINE to approve the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth,--among the original 10-as well--when given the chance--the 14th Amendment, too.

So I paid attention when a sensible chap posted the following on the Book recently:

I believe that it is increasingly difficult to construct a theory of democratic constitutionalism, applying our own 21st-century norms, that vindicates the Constitution under which we are governed today. Our 18th-century ancestors had little trouble integrating slavery and the rank subordination of women into their conception of a "republican" political order.

He followed with a sensible plea to have a Constitutional do-over.

It's hard to argue against, hard not to agree.

But I do object: the conditions which seem to us to make the "old" Constitution possibly "obsolete" also dictate that there is frankly NO CHANCE of scrapping it and/or "rewriting it," substantially, without inevitably, and irreversibly reducing the numbers and kinds of freedoms we could enjoy.

I don't actually LIKE being a wet blanket on such ideas I gotta say: Imagine Walmart in charge of the process, or Goldman-Sachs.

If you think a "new" Constitution can be drafted which would NOT be INFINITELY MORE to the liking of the Banksters and fraudsters, and the crooks, shills, and grifters in the CorpoRat boardrooms than the one under which we now labor, well I'd have to conclude that you haven't thoroughly considered just how COMPLETELY the Citizens United decision truly altered the face of political financing, and the reach of the corpoRat purse-strings.

I'd estimate there is exactly ZERO chance that the free speech clause of the first amendment would survive, being supplanted by a clause protecting the right of the propagandist to lie. You'd never hear another WORD about the 4th Amendment, and probably the Fifth would be revoked. I mean why should you need to protect yourself if you're not doing anything wrong?
See the problem?

Plus, to enact one, A new Constitution would have to be voted on. Regardez vous Prop 8 in Cal for the consequences of putting rights to the vote. And that was BEFORE the gloves came off, with Citizens United. Hundreds of millions were spent to prevent a class of citizens from enjoying the full rights of citizenship, and the "people" were propagandized to accept it?

Sorry. You just don't VOTE on "rights," hippies...

As the Cookie Crumbles: Coincidence? I Think NOT!

Ultra-lib commentator Jim Hightower the other day ALSO delivered himself of a rant based on the Preamble to the Constitution. Musta been a good day for it.

Hightower's conceit (if it is that), like that of so many of his peers in the commentariat, is that he pretends (okay, mebbe he's sincere; whatever) that the direction that the the bankstas, financiers, and Capitalists, and the WHOLE political establishment they have bought and paid for are taking us, is some kind of aberration, that it's just an accident that current policies radically disempower the People and COINCIDENTALLY undercut the possibility of continuing democratic self-government, and that once "the people" are once again in charge, things will get "better." We're "BIGGER than this," he proclaims.

You know: THEY--Hightower, Reich, Hartmann, Cenk, Olbermann, Krugman, even, all of 'em-- HAVE TO SAY THAT.

It's what they're paid to say. What their paid to do is: to ignore the undeniable--and probably irreversible--structural ASSAULT on the popular sovereignty of the US citizenry by the Elites as if it were just an accident, or just some nasty, unforeseen consequence of their general dickishness.

Whereas it is nothing less than the WHOLE agenda of the Oligarchs, corpoRats and their minions in gummint for no LESS than 60 years... In effect, the commentariat BLAME US for losing power, rather than name the real malefactors who've stolen it and who also write their paychecks. (I am amazed how often I am reminded of Upton Sinclair's clairvoyance in the 20s when he remarked how DIFFICULT it is to get a man to see what his paycheck depends on him ignoring.)

Some folks have complained that this view amounts to a claim of a "conscious conspiracy."

Mebbe; not exactly, but it's close enough for gummint work:

Let's call it (in honor of Foucault, the guy whose analytic I'm viewing this through, might call) a "discursive" conspiracy, or a conspiracy of "epistemic affinities."

One would have to be blind to not have noticed that the ultra-wealthy, their satraps, toadies, courtesans, and gunsels (e.g., the John Birch Society (it STARTED with Koch money, ya know, right?) have been dedicated since the mid 50s--even before, according to General Smedley Butler-- to the overthrow of self-sovereignty of the American People and have been single-mindedly been dedicated to overthrowing it, from the inside. See, e.g., the teabagger contingent in Congress.

They have done and continue to do everything they possible to make Government seem as irrelevant, yet dirty, as possible, to trivialize it, to drive the People AWAY from their Constitution and poison its institutions--which happen to be ALL that stand between the Owners and whatever that's left worth having...

The movement is so pervasive, and so universal among the institutions of wealth--which are our "landmark institutions, of finance, business, and culture-- that one can no longer name ANY single author of those practices which regulate social behaviors. Yet the effects are inextricably embedded in the 'historical' memory of the institutions themselves.

Though if yu wanted to blame someone, we might remember the (blessedly late) Gipper's noxious quip: "The eight most feared words in the English language: "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help."

I wanna crap on Raygun's grave. That's the very tippy-TOP of my bucket list, hippies. What's on yours? We'll compare notes when I see you at the beach.

As The Cookie Crumbles: Gay-Ron-TEED!

I am a BIG fan of the Preamble to the US Constitution. It is a MODEL of terse concision. It is one of the most rational paragraphs ever committed to vellum, yet it has no legal weight. And it is ALSO an interesting case of how textual authority is distributed.

Though I am NOT a lawyer/constitutional scholar, even the most cursory little google search yields copious authorities stating that there is no legal precedent in which the "Preamble" has been determinative. So it retains no power in law; yet it's rhetorical power is considerable:

We the People of the United States, in Order to (1) form a more perfect Union, (2) establish Justice, (3)insure domestic Tranquility, (4) provide for the common defence, (5) promote the general Welfare, and (6) secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

This short paragraph contains, in outline, ALL the proximate causes and the purposes, and the rationale of "Government" of ANY damn kind! What ELSE would you want it to do?

In just about 50 words, it articulates EVERY possible reason to create a government, a "State." The part I wanna focus on is that whole "to promote the general welfare"-thing? 5th out of six, yes, but still and ahead of the progeny? Significant!

What that meant, THEN, in a still agrarian, still frontier, still imperiled, still unsettled land is not what we might expect it to betoken for us today. Yet the Founders were practical fellows. Their ideas of "general Welfare" as a social good would not differ far from our own.

So, in a predominantly "urban" civilization, where the overwhelming majority of citizens are prohibited by location, situation and especially EXPERIENCE--how many of us have slaughtered an animal or ground wheat for bread?--from eking out a subsistence "living" from their surroundings...

In an economy wholly sustained bymoney, a guaranteed annual "subsistence" income--say, for the sake of agrument, equal to the minimum wage, perhaps--should be a civil right, and an exemplary case of 'promoting the general welfare." If you have no "money," you basically do not exist in the social calculus of this culture.

Put another way, (And if that isn't the longest sentence you read today, I'll eat a hat...W):

Under conditions of late-industrial/mature financial Capitalism, when the State has vouchsafed such Commons as have thus far survived appropriation from private property accumulation by the wealthy,

and when there is no longer any (legal) way to provide a dignified life, or even sustainable subsistence (hence, beggars), without "money,"

I regard there to be no other way to interpret that clause in the Preamble to the Constitution, to "promote the public welfare"--one of the ONLY six designated purposes of/for a/the State-- except that the provision of a guaranteed annual base-line income--along with free health care, the provision for free elections, and the maintenance of borders--are just about the ONLY legitimate expenses the State can incur.

And it's far better for them to be spent that way than to be squandered in ruinous international military adventures which function only to support the enrichment of the corpoRats or the to fool the people that it is NOT desperate grasp of a falling empire to obtain impossible immortality.

All Empires fall, hippies, no matter the efforts to sustain them. So screw it, let's go surfing...

Hippie News & Stuff (12/26/11): Self-Destructive

Hola, Hippies, Winstone, my good man, thanks for the kind words, and Bugs, well, y'know how we do...


At the risk of sounding perhaps a little hyerbolic, we DO seem standing on the edge of the abyss, staring on-coming destruction right in the eye...

And instead of pitching in to avert looming disaster, the politicos in DC--particularly the GOPhux, but with the apparent complicity of far too many ALLEGED Dims--seem content to stand by while a the last few nails are driven into the plain, pine boards where the Constitution is interred.

Remember how everybody got the vapors when Rush said--and the Yertle, the Senator echoed--how it was gonna be the GOPhux' job for the next 4 years see that St. Barry, the Accommodating, was a failure? How everyone was aghast we were (while some folx cheereed??? How COULD they, we all asked, incredulously? And then the proceeded to DO IT!

They LOUDLY and PROUDLY proclaimed the fall of Obambster to be their ultimate goal...But THAT claim is not supported by the Party's actual deeds: they have not put up as a candidate ANYONE who actually stands ANY chance of 'defeating' brave Sir Barry next year.... Newt and Rick Perry BOTH MISSED the filing deadlines for the VIRGINIA primary, which suggests to me a certain lack of seriousness, on the parts of both candidates and their Party...

So what's really up?

Here's my thought: While their attacks nominally are on Sir Barry, the brunt of the assault--and the depredations during the Bushevik years, before that--REALLY IS "structural."

That is: It's an assault on VERY INSTITUTIONS, and INSTRUMENTS --that's Congress, the Executive and the Courts, inclusively, hippies-- by which the Constitutionally empowered Common Folks such as US, in a democratic republic, such as this one, are supposed to be able just POSSIBLY to feebly resist the final Usurpation of the Commons and the conquest of the State by the global, corpoRat Oner/Owner/Oligarchy.

They cant come right out and say that, of course; not just yet, anyway. But saying they're "bringing down Obama" wins support for this project from the "base" which will, of course, ALSO be ass-fucked by the GOPhux plans...

The "loyal Opposition" (yeah-right) SAY they're ONLY doing what they HAVE to do to defeat the Obambster.

And they get away with it, because destroying brave Sir Barry is acceptable, certainly to their base. The GOPhux can do ANYTHING they wanna, if it will result in the defeat of the Nigra. Bringing down the entire democratic infrastructure is NOT acceptable, UNLESS or EXCEPT if it is the "unforeseen consequence" of "driving that damn Negro out of town."

So, as we conclude another year, perhaps hyperbole is the least of our difficulties.

See ya at the beach in the NEW YEAR, hippies: Prospero Ano Nuevo, todos--now back to my pal, WinSTONER, in hippie central...

HN &S: Naming Names

We're Number One! We're Number One! USA! USA! It being an even-numbered year impending, there will be plenty of occasions to hear the chants and bragadoccio resound in athletic and political venues.

Now, it's one of my own personal "editorial" conceits is that I make fun, a little, of the iconic terms by which my countryfolk identify themselves. Under the heading of complaints youi'll never fix?

So, I refer to "Americans" as "USers," since we're the NUMBER ONE users of shit on the planet.

I've been trying to spread "USers" as a subversive meme for a close to decade now, but I'm the only one apparently who recognizes the wit and cleverness of my allusion. You're not supposed to have to explain a good joke, but apparently it's n ot a good joke, so here goes:

To me, there's no fewer than four levels at which changing our national appellation, "works":

1) USers aren't the ONLY "Americans," though we imperialistically ceded the term to ourselves exclusively, so it reinstitutes a necessary distinction;

2) "US" metonymizes the whole title of the State just as well as "American" does, and does it more efficiently;

3) US also names "us," the group, the way the names of tribal groups always mean "the people" in whatever the relevant language, and

4) the aforementioned, globe-gobbling consumptive habits we so thoughtlessly exhibit... This was the "BEST" Black Weekend on record. It's like we're celebrants toasting marshmallows on the fire that's already consumed the kitchen and is starting on the den.

On the whole, "USer" works perhaps on TOO many levels--which in not a bad thing, except in a country which regards "nuance" with the same acceptance as it would "leprosy."

Anyway, you see what fun you can have with words, hippies?
Bring the scrabble board, and we can play at the beach, if the surf's not up. Back to you in hippie-central, winstone...

Addendum:

Another term I virtually always substitute in prose is "'Murkun" for "American." That's cuz most of the people who I hear saying the word, outside the professionally "literate" class, truncate it. Usually the "A" disappears or is barely hinted at; hence the 'apostrophe'. Then the first diphthong, which in Standard American English (SAE) rhymes with /bear/, slurs into a sound like vowel sound in /murky/ or /murder/... The third syllable is elided, swallowed, disappeared; the "i" vanishes. And the "can," as finishing syllable is filled with a schwa.

"'Murkun."

This'n, as my pal Trish reminded me, is a little more problematic, cuz it "class-loaded, in ways that USer isn't.

As the Cookie Crumbles: Missing Our Marx

Frederic Jamison, the Marxist critic and theorist, speculated, about a decade ago, that "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." Probably, without chaotic, catastrophic upheaval of a truly global cataclysmic nature, it is IMPOSSIBLE. They are entwined.

This is, in part, of course, because capitalism is so deeply embedded in the chartacter and nature of modern life, and for so long, that all--or nearly all--the institutions and structures we inhabit are either implanted within it, or they are in fact dependent upon it. The roots of the system extend deep into the Renaissance, and are embedded in the very fabric of law and custom of virtually ALL the places where European influence touched and settled.

Marx saw Capital as a transitory, intermediary stage in the materialist march toward socialism, and I respect Herr marx greatly. (Karl also fondly believed in the "perfectibility of human nature." It is there that he and I diverge, but that is a subject for another day...)

At all events, I do NOT see how socialism CAN emerge from such a predatory capitalistic system, except literally from the ashes...

We can find fodder for Marxist critique everywhere.

That lil, ol' Marxist, Dr. Woody, unpacked a stinky morsel of it the other day when he happened into a discussion on F-Book of the publically expressed "necessity" of what mainstream economists call "structural unemployment."

You've probably heard the term. It's circulated a lot. It's a euphemism--See, i.e., Orwell--for the embedded requirement within the Capitalist ontology that there be a permanent pool of workers desperate for jobs, from which POOL the Owners can threaten to replace fractious or dissident workers demanding too many (that is, any) concessions from the Bosses.

This is called "enforcing worker discipline" in the manuals of CorpoRat culture. You'll hear about it in MBA school, but no place else (except here, on WWH!).

For a long time--since the early '50s, last Century, the size of that pool of unemployed workers needed to perform and maintain "worker discipline,"-- i.e., the service of keeping the WORKING work-force docile through silent blackmail and intimidation--was thought by 'mainstream' economists, to be about 4%. In a work-force comprising say, 50 million jobs, that's about 200,000 workers for whom there are, by definition, NO JOBS--unless they replace someone who already has one.

But that was before the technology explosion multiplied productive potential by orders of magnitudes over the past 30 years; since then the "magic" number has been edging upward, so that it's now around EIGHT percent.

Once again, in the same 50 Million job universe, that would be FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND people for whom there are no jobs. But then introduce the element of the (structurally unavoidable) boom-bust cycle of Capital--i.e., the Great Recession/Depression--and suddenly there are no longer 50 Million jobs, there are only 35 Million jobs, but you still got the structurally (I call them) 'disemployed" pool sized to a larger economy, and the effects multiply.

You wanna know what the official "name" for the acceptable/necessary number of people for whom there are no jobs unless they get them from someone else.

You'll laugh, Hippies.

Funnily enough, that number is called "Full Employment."

Us less-than-fully-employed, we meet at the beach...

HN & S: DIS-Employed

From the WWH Department of Fucking DUH!

A recent piece in the scab-run Huff Post reports the obvious: Quote: Nearly all who lost jobs are worse off now. A recent poll of Americans who lost their job during the most intense period of the Great Recession shows that only 7 percent have climbed back to their previous financial position." It goes on:

"The other 93 percent may have experienced a minor or a major change in lifestyle; they may think of themselves as being in good, fair, or poor shape; and they may consider their new condition temporary or permanent. What they all have in common is that right now, they are not doing as well as they were before the recession hit."

I recently read a report in the financial press somewhere that --of those who were what out brethren in the Home Aisles call "obsoleted" or "rendered redundant-- NO MORE THAN 30% will EVER find the means to return to their previous levels of affluence (relatively), security or responsibility.

It's even worse if you're over 50. If you're over 50 and have been out of work, still, since 2008 or thereabouts, you might as well go smoke the tailpipe, cuz YOUR chances are even less than the average.

But the way Woody sees it, the vast majority of people who no longer have jobs aren't "unemployed." That's the wrong word for it.

While it's true they don't have jobs, that's mostly NOT their fault. There aren't any jobs to have.

The Monthly Lie from the Labor Department declares the "jobless" rate at under 9 percent for the first time in it seems like a generation.

But the DoL numbers are notoriously incomplete, incorrect, and biased for the status quo. If the data are even remotely reliable, likely it's because several hundred thousand folks, whose benefits expired recently, have quit reporting themselves unemployed and quit looking for work.

In addition, just for shot of reality: A hundred twenty thousand "new" jobs aren't enough to put the people to work who only last month JOINED the workforce, much less replace any "lost" jobs.

"Unemployed" makes it sound like there's some sort of choice, and that the person so labeled is in that position voluntarily. "Unemployed" blames the victim as much as the system. They're NOT fucking "unemployed."

They are "DISEMPLOYED."

They HAD jobs, until their JOBS were eliminated to save the CorpoRats a few sheckels. They didn't "lose" their jobs.

I dunno about you all, but I NEVER "lost" a job" in my whole life...

I knew EXACTLY where every last one of them sumbitches was the day they run me off...

The DISEMPLOYED meet daily at the beach, hippies... Back to Hippie Central, Winstone...

As the Coocie Crumbled: Two Years Later...

Why Obama Isn't Getting Anything Done...And Won't..."Hyar com' de new bahss, jis lahk de o' bahss."
On Sunday, November 29, 2009, I posted the following text on my "Walled-in Pond" blog: All that vaunted and hyped and spun "hopery-changery" is sheerest, purest de/illusion, the vague assurance of some kind of "corpoRate" brand quality. It has to do with the calculations of the Owners and the fact that even WHITE people were developing a deep dislike and distrust for the Chimp and his cheneyed minions. A change was definitely needed. Folks--even white folks--were becoming restive.

SO, in a year when, literally, ANYBODY could have beaten the Pukes at the polls, when the Party suffered the lowest approval numbers in 50 years, with the Puke candidate pool either cancerous or carcinogenic, the Dims put up "novelty" candidates--the first woman & the first non-white, both, simultaneously--either one of which would have faced exactly the same problems with governing, but (having) both of which would emboss the "Dim" brand with "cred" for the 'lower orders' whom the Party is supposed to represent.

(One reason why the Dims anymore have so little authority is that their constituency, while numerous, is also economically and socially powerless: i.e., the "losers." It's like high school, and the Pukes are the BMW-driving jocks and their retinues, whole the Dims are the nose-pickers. Revenge of the nerds? It is to laugh!)

In the event, Obama was "preferable" to the owners (he got the nod)--whence, Rupert Murdoch's entirely sensible personal endorsement of him; Obama's been the BEST thing for Faux Gnuz since 9/11 and terrorism)--mainly because there is already a greater cultural predisposition to hate ("despise") a "colored" person than a 'white' woman. And, since the job of this president--whomsoever it turned out to have been--was to be someone onto whom 'angry white (male)' voters could displace their fear and loathing of the Bushies (and CorpoRats whom they so evidently represented), thereby paving the way for their return in the next cycle, the male PoC is a more viable--a mopre 'acceptable'--object of hatred and derision than a 'white' woman would have been.(Remember, I wrote this 2 years ago)So as president, Obama is probably going to preside over a devastating series of apparent and real failures, festooned with a couple of symbolic, but nevertheless Pyrrhic "victories"--probably they'll give him a basically meaningless health-care-insurance-reform-savings bill to sign.

But, he cannot abandon Central Asia. That's where his owners' and paymasters' real interests lie: in and under the mud of the Caspian Sea. To have any say in the disposition of the undeveloped riches there, "we" must be able to "extend influence" in the region: that is, bring under the bomb- and gun-sights of USer tactical aircraft--indusputably and unopposably the best in the world--every person, place and thing in a thousand-mile radius. So we're not leaving Central Asia.

And despite the best evidence of many thousands of studies, charts, and cores, nobody--including "thePrez"--is going to get serious about the imminent collapse of the world climate system, the poisoning of the oceans, the eliimination of fish stocks, the poisoning of more forests, the mining of more 'blood-minerals.'

And he's turned Wall Street right back to the venal mendacities of the criminals and cretins who nearly brought the whole thing down in the first place. And he's restored their perqs, and he hasn't restored any meaningful regulation.

It is symptomatic of just how weak he is in really practical matters that it took until last week to get his FIRST appellate judicial nominee confirmed, and there were at LEAST 70 former Bushevik US attorneys still mucking up the works in the DoJ, which is still and probably irremediably now a sump of politicization and obstruction.

It was a set-up. Anyway, that has seemed obvious to me for some time, since the primaries.

Now, with the renewed "official/bipartisan" attention to "fixing"--that is, "gutting"--Social Security to "pay for" limited, preferential, expensive health insurance, it seems another part of his job may be to preside over the final coup de gras to the New Deal.

Like it took a Puke--Nixon--to go to China, it needs a Dim to eviscerate the social safety net. Obama's the designated hitter here (but the job would have fallen to--and been gladly assumed by--Hillary, too, if she'd been selected instead.). Between bouts of fellating the ghost of Ronald Reagan and dissing the movements of the 60s and 70s which paved the way for his eventual emergence onto the national stage, Obama did say, during the campaign, that SS 'reform' would be on the table.

How easy to forget, because the voice is mellifluous, and the discourse articulate, that once on there, nothing ever leaves whole...
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON!

I repeat this here not to brag on any prophetic propensities of my own, but to point to the ease with which even a dilettante such as myself could tumble to the facts of the matter, just how 1) obvious it must have been and 2) the SHEER MASTERY of the propaganda effort required to the glittering image..

I'll go out on a dilettantish limb here and "predict" here and now that in 2016, the GOPhux ticket will be a recrudescence of the Bush/Cheney meme, only the FIRST names changed: Jebbie and Lizzie.

You heard it first here on WorldWideHippies, hippies!

As the Cookie Crumbles (12/3/11): Lawn ordure

There's a sorta counter-culture joke that if you remember the 60s, you probably weren't "there." I was, and I do.

And I gotta say, brutal aggressions inflicted on the peacefully assembled members of the OCCUPY movement, as municipal regimes of power endeavored to reclaim control of the streets and parks, curbs and campuses, seem to have been greeted with an outrage that, to me anyway, was unexpectedly both surprised and astonished. It had a tone that, it seems to me could only originate in youth or depraved indifference: Either the surprise is coming from someone too young to have experienced the counter-cultural revolution of the decade (@) 1964-74 with any meaningful cognitive acumen, or they are willfully, ignorantly in denial of it.

Cuz, of course, it's all happened before. I was there, though in my day, only the tear-gas was 'weapons'-grade,' not the pepper-spray, and the shackles were steel... From my own experience, I can attest that there is not much in the armory of justice like a steel-shod police horse urging you to move along, to disperse a dissident crowd, no matter how reluctant they might be...

I hate to actually refer to this again, cuz I feel like I'm doing the State's work by reminding you, but who remembers the killings of four innocent students at Kent State. You're spozed to. That's why they keep reminding us. A good photograph is easier to reproduce than a hung jury, on what now seems to have been an officer's premeditated order to open fire by the Ohio National Guard on an unarmed, non-threatening, DISTANT crowd.

A couple weeks later, it happened again at Jackson State U, in Mississippi, but in that case, of course, the victims were BLACK kids, so it got a LOT less attention, then as now. You could look it up...

Back then, they called out the Guard to do their dirty work.

These days, with the Guard at least partially still deployed in combat adventures overseas, that responsibility seems now to have devolved on the local and State cops. But that's okay, cuz with the apparently irresistible, probably irreversible infection of the civilian constabulary with the "Pentagon Syndrome," --that's the inter-penetration of the police systems with weapons, tactics, and ideologies all perfected in counter-insurgencies in wars of choice over the last 40 years, the mission of the civilian police departments in many--if not MOST--locales is either rapidly being, or already has been transformed:

From "Serve & Protect," to "Search & Destroy"!

There's nothing in the worst of us that isn't in the REST of us. Back in the '70s, a psychologist named Zimbardo, at Stanford iirc, conducted an infamous experiment which was instructive in this matter of power.

He created a faux-prison environment, and recruited subjects to perform either as guards or as prisoners. He informed the guards they were permitted to use ANY means necessary to enforce compliance from the prisoners. They SWIFTLY descended into savagery and sadism. The experiment was cancelled within DAYS, if not hours.

Thus proving, along with Milgram's study a decade earlier, at Yale, where he tested the limit of the willingness to inflict pain to achieve compliance, that our "inner fucking Pig-cop" is not far buried in any of us, and all we await is permission/reason/excuse to turn the fucker loose..

Put another way: Dress anyone at all in a cop-suit and their inner "fucking Pig" emerges almost instantaneously! Cops follow orders to commit mayhem in the name of order because it's their JOB.

I believe EVERYBODY, at some time in their live, and preferrably early enough to make a cognitive difference, should be seriously rousted by the cops, treated to the full script as a suspected "perp/skel." ("Okay, motherfucker, you know the drill: Assume the position and don't you fucking MOVE!")

By a "good" cop on a bad day or by a BAD cop ANY day.

TO also think there should be a draft for the police-force. Make EVERYBODY do it, like military service usta be. That way everybody gets tarred with the same brush. But that's speculation for another day.

Or when I see you at the beach, hippies.
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By the way, as you know, we're hip-deep in the "holiday season," and folks are thinking "gifts." If that's you, swing on by the WWH Company Store, and haul in a basket of WWH-tchotchkes to help assuage your incipient guilt.