Anosognosia

As the Cookie Crumbles (1/26/12): Post Mortem

2012-01-25T09:16:00.000-08:00

I'll be honest: I didn't watch brave Sir Barry's annual address on the State of the Nation, last night. I simply refuse. I have endured 10 presidents in my lifetime, and in these things, nothing ever changes. There are the usual, stale, patriotic tropes, depleted analogies, the exhausted metaphors and sincere exhortations to reclaim our national spirit, all of which have grown to ring hollowly, emptily out from the speakers, as if spoken by nebulous, rapturous evanescent orators detached entirely from reality. "Justice?" Where is "justice?" How can they talk about "justice," even rhetorically? It is as extinct as the carrier pigeon.

One can say, once again, if nothing else, Sir Barry gives goood speech. His melliflouous voice, with its cadences reminiscent of Sunday preaching, and his skillful and adroit use of language are the fruits of years of careful work and refinement. I remember Joe Biden said he was clean, presentable, and erudite. He still is.

I gathered my notes for this review from secondary sources. There were several themes, all of which lent themselves to the 'campaign' tenor of the event, and the 'populist tone' which this glib epitome of the coordinator class tries to project. I asm going to focus on two, related themes.

Fairness: Much was made of the disparity between the tax rates paid by common folks and those paid by the far more fortunate few. Sir Barry made some points by suggesting a top rate for people with incomes over a $1million/year of 30 percent. That is actually a REDUCTION, however, since the top marginal rate today is--wait for it---already THIRTY FIVE PERCENT.

BUT: If he were truly serious (bwahahahaha) about rationalizing the tax structure, he'd have introduced the idea of a "Financial Transactions Tax" on all "securities" (stocks, bonds, etc) and/or money/instrument trading schemes in the amount of 2 mils on the dollar, net value, on every transaction over, say, $10,000.

With such a tax in place, there would be enough money to fund a national, guaranteed-care, health care provision system, cradle to grave, for every person in the country.

But it makes better politics, I guess, to make the populist appeal to screw the arrogant bastards than to put the system to the use of the people...Heaven fucking forfend.

Then there was Competitiveness -- Shazama said he wants to "create more jobs and improve US workers' competitiveness." And I cringe and my tailfeathers curl under when I hear that shit.

Here's where you can tell he's blowin smoke up yer ass!

The phrase "improve competitiveness," like "increase productivity," is nothing but code for the eternal Bosses mantra of "reduce workers' wages and benefits, cripple unions, and end regulations" so that USer labor costs are comparable to those in the rest of the world.

So, if I read it aright, he means to increase the number of shitty jobs, lower wages and benefits, and turn the country over to the CorpoRats??

In what I must say was hubris even for the President, he extolled the USofA as "The Indispensable country." Stuff like that is "why they hate us." Because by making that claim about US, he's directly implying that other nations aren't indespensable, are in fact disposable or expendable. I gotta think that sets some teeth on edge in other capitols.

Then there were the usual discursive farts about how the wasted trillions of dollars and the million or so Iraqi dead made us safer; in the same vein, there was the pipe-dream of 'safe' gas-shale extraction, aka fracking. Of course, he's also extolled the virtues of clean coal, too.

So I was less than impressed, and I'm dumb-founded by the euphoria and triumphal zeal that attended it. But folks often take me to task for being negative, so I've got a little list of what I'd try to do if I ran the Zoo:

I would advocate a guaranteed annual income, enough to sustain a person in dignity whether they can find work or not. There will probably never again be "enough" jobs to keep everybody working who needs a job. There then would be no need for the "minimum wage," which makes sense because net jobs are disappearing faster than the people retiring from them can get aweay, and they WON'T be replaced.

I advocate TIGHT--down-right draconian--regulation of industrial and work-place safety. I spent some time in the construction binness in the old days and "cavalier" doesn't begin to touch corpoRat attitudes about disposable workers.

I advocate super stringent environmental legislation and regulation. I advocate for the corporate death penalty for frequent/repeat violators. I advocate imprisonment of violators and the termination of their businesses.

I'd declare that I knew ALL businesses are always slyly on the look out for ways to cut expensive corners, or to avoid regulations, or to escape taxes, to cheat workers, to short clients and customers and to escape detection. The larger the business, the greater the chances are for misfeasance. And so I'd double the number of attorneys investigating shabby/shoddy business practices.

I'd advocate for the overturning of Citizens United, in any way I could, and the repeal of CorpoRat personhood.

I also advocate a BAN on GMO seed; For a nationalized energy sector, and FOR MUCH stronger regulation on the "finance" industry, including returning to the principles abandoned when Rubin, Clinton, Summers, Greenspan, and Gramm killed Glass-Steagall in '99.

AND FOR a 'profits' cap, and as I said before a "financial-transactions tax" (2 mil per dollar) on stock, bond, or money transactions.

Just so's you know I, too, can think positive thoughts, hippies.

Tell me whatcha think when I see you at the beach...

HN & S, Jan 23, 2012: Run-Off

2012-01-24T05:49:00.001-08:00

Two years ago this week, the SCROTUS decision in the Citizens United case handed the body politic of the USofA over to the tender mercies of the CorpoRats, by granting them 1st Amendment protections, and removing restrictions on CorpoRat spending to influence USer elections. Brave Sir Barry has dithered ever since.

IF he were TRULY desirous of combatting this political malignancy, there's AT LEAST two things Shamwow COULD HAVE DONE, AT ANY TIME in the last two years!!!--Without ANY authorization or approval from ANYBODY, and which COULD have ALREADY vitiated somewhat the poisonous toxicity of the Citizens United opinion:

1) Promulgated an executive order REQUIRING ALL and ANY corporations that do business with the government to disclose their political spending, beginning TOMORROW!

And 2) he COULD have been using the presidential bully-pulpit and declared his strong support for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics permanently and/or eliminate corporate Personhood.

We all KNOW the skeevy, jug-eared, grinning huckster WON'T do ANY of that and, since no such orders or advocacy will be forthcoming, we're stuck trying to pass an amendment, even without St. Barry's imprimatur.

The difficulties of enacting them notwithstanding, there is but one true KEY--the Holy Grail-- for such an amendment: public financing.

WHICH is the key virtue of the proposal Dennis Kucenish advanced last week. Of the several amendments in the hopper, Kucenich's appears to be the simplest: It forbids private contributions of any kind to federal elections.. Cuts right to the chase.

On another site, somebody complained: "Public financing means officially sanctioned candidates, doesn't it?"

Nah, done properly, candidates chosen this way wouldn't be "officially," but "publically!" vetted...Here's how I think it would work: think "run-offs:"

Level One: anybody who wants to run for office starts with x-dollars to spend dispensed by the state. No other funding is allowed. They use that money to get noticed, win support for their ideas. There's a vote. The top 10 advance. There's more money. There's another run-off. The top three advance. There's more money. There's a final ballot. There's a winner. It's public and transparent every step of the way!

Finance it?

We take the money it costs to run one carrier battle group for four years and every four years, that money is dedicated to the "presidential election project."

Every two years, we take the money it costs to support an Army division, or a bomber wing, and that goes to Congressional elections.

Seriously, hippies:

Other than providing for the general welfare and defending the borders, what better purpose IS THERE on which to spend our money than the selection and election of representatives who will write our laws and regulate our lives?

We can talk about what we're gonna run for when I see you at the beach...Paz! Back atcha, Winstone!

As The Cookie Crumbles: Corpses

2012-01-20T16:51:00.000-08:00

Whenever there's some new revelation or fresh evidence of human stupidity, depravity, intolerance and/or other ugliness--especially if it's our countryfolk who appear to have committed it, there are veritable GALES of messages desperately, beseechingly wailing "Aren't we better than this?"

To even a novice student of history such as I, the answer, based on our record--which includes atrocities of varying scope and scale as far back as the colonization of the continent--obviously is "No. We are NOT "better than this," our vaunted exceptionality notwithstanding.

But NO ONE is.

This discussion became germane last week, in view of the flurry of emotion and outrage unleashed with the fotos of some Marines pissing on the corpses of Afghans they'd recently killed. The howls were as loud as they were predictable. How can we descend to "their" level, the plaintive cries demand? We're AMERICANS, they proclaim, exceptionally. We are better than that...

I want to ask, "better than what?" USer soldiers have committed far worse atrocities than merely urinating on the bodies of the fallen. Col. Chivington's Colorado militia cut the breasts off living Cheyenne women after raping and murdering their children.

More recently, nearly 60 percent of the remains of Japanese soldiers repatriated after the war from the battle zones in the Marianna Islands--Guadalcanal is one of them--were returned withOUT skulls. The war in the Pacific was fought almost entirely under the unspoken order to take no prisoners; only one in about 50 combat vets of the period report having killed prisoners, but more than 60 percent reported having witnessed it.

In Vietnam, US troops pretty routinely took ears off their kills; also, fingers. Some took penises, I've been told. We all heard about My Lai, and the massacre there. It was NOT an isolated or a unique incident, by the accounts I've heard.

You gotta understand. In war, there is no "better" way; there are no rules. And soldiers have desecrated the corpses of their fallen enemies as long there have been victorious soldiers and fallen enemy corpses to defile. Warfare REQUIRES soldiers to dehumanize their enemies. You can't get fired u enough if there is a shred of their humanity still to be considered.

Though I'm a vet, I served only on the periphery of the Vietnam war. I was never in a combat situation--"in the SHIT" as they called it... My 'evidence' is all hear-say, but the way I heard folks tell it who have been, when the guy or guys trying to kill YOU, lies dead at your feet, and you killed him instead, you wanna dance on his face, cut off his head and shit in his throat. That's how it was described to me.

It's NOT 'un-natural,' except to the extent that WAR itself is unnatrural. It's primal. Why do you think Achilles dragged poor, dead Hector around the walls of Troy? Homer wasn't just making shit up to make his poem spicier or more popular with the Greeks. He was describing a common, existential fact.

Only the names of the killers and their victims change.

What you should be upset about is that the guys doing the pissing were there doing the KILLING in the first place, and they were doing it in YOUR and OUR names. Still, after 10 years.

How can citizens demand extraordinary compassion of our soldiers when we do not extend it to our own citizens?

We are not a "civilized" nation, and will NEVER be, as long as the State encourages taking private profit from the immiseration (the imprisonment, illness, injury, disability or death) of its citizens.

When we cannot or will not take proper care of our own, will not protect the most vulnerable from the predations of profit in their darkest and weakest hours, where do we get the chutzpah to complain when OUR soldiers behave inhumanely to their adversaries corpses?

They did no more to those corpses than our own gummint does to the weakest of us, pissing on us when we're down...

[This post is my most visited, so far, on the Worldwide Hippies YouTube page. Last time I looked, there were more than 200 hits! Woohoo!]

January 18, 2012: Stop PIPA/SOPA Day

2012-01-18T08:08:00.001-08:00

January 18, 2012: Stop PIPA/SOPA Day

It is probably unrealistic in the EXTREME to imagine that a functioning oligarchy in full cry might permit the continued, unmodified, uninterfered operation of so fundamentally liberating a technology as the Intertubez has become, and still remains. We need only regard how television was co-opted, and its liberatory poitential was turned aside, to become--along with the rest of its flickering-screened scions--the most POTENT agent of propaganda promulgation ever invented.

I regard the present structure of the Intertubez as I regard the Constitution: It works pretty well as it stands, and fucking around with it pretty much invites the bullies in, so leave it the fuck alone.

--Woody, Jan 18, 2012

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Hippie News * Stuff, Jan. 16, 2012: Soft Energy

2012-01-16T17:12:00.001-08:00

About 35 years ago, a woman about my mother's age, appeared at my newspaper desk in Santa Fe with a disturbing tale about the coming, inevitable changes which loomed on our energy horizons like storms at sea. It was 75 or 76, not long AFTER the first gas shortage, of '73, and the issue had already faded in Public Mind.

She told me of her son, who had a book coming out which foretold how crises in cost, price and sustainability of our current fuels--which he called "hard" energy--would threaten the whole productive economy of the planet.

The proverbial two roads diverged, her son said in his book, and there was a clear opportunity to implement necessary reforms. The alternative, she said, was sensibly called a "soft" energy path. And her son, Amory Lovins and his bride, Hunter were going to be coming to NM for a visit and wouldn't I--meaning, of course, me--like to do a story about them and it?

But the gas crisis of '73 hadn't hardly touched me, a callow, know-it-all, cocky veteran, recent college-graduate, and world traveler, and I blew it off. I still kick myself at the recollection, because, of course, the Lovins' were absolutely CORRECT! The path we're on leads to disaster.

One of the consequences of hard energy which we DO NOT usually see revealed appeared in reports recently that the "hard" oil industry was in effect threatening to blackmail brave Sir Barry and Lady Clenis into peremptorily approving the proposed oil/slurry pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico--where it my more easily and more profitably join the international flow of fungible oil supplying energy (above all else) profitably for the people who "own" the resource, to an increasingly energy-ravenous world.

Apparently, the decision is still on hold, until after election day. But you can imagine how the exchange might have gone, between an some Oiligarch's gunsel and an Energy Dept, or Interior Dept flunky:

"Psst. Hey! Boy! Yeah you! Tell yer Bosses to approve the pipeline. Nice little deal you got goin, here. It'd be a SHAME if gasoline went to $7 bucks a gallon a week before election day, wootnit?. Knowwaddamean, boy?"

The Oiligarchs won't abandon their monopoly until the last dollar is squeezed out of the last possible barrel of oil, and fashioned a NEW monopoly, too. And they won't stop drilling til they've processed it ALL...

And what the current economic slow-down shows is that there isn't ANY interest out in the "private" sector for the kind of investment which would bring "soft" energy into the mainstream.

These are the vicissitudes of the 'hard' energy path we're on...

Amory Lovins, who with then-wife Hunter, went on to found Rocky Mouontain Institute, in '76 published that book, called "Soft Energy Paths." Check it out at the link on the bottom of the screen. Maybe, if we are VERY VERY lucky, it is not yet too late.

Hell, we can even get energy from the tides, at the beach, hippies...

Back to you in hippie-central, Winstone...

(Run this URL at least the last minute or so, please:
Rocky Mountain Institute, http://www.rmi.org/

*****************************

One particularly thorny problem, if you stop and really THINK about it, is the challenge of completely REFITTING the whole, complex, interwoven "grids" which took the last 100 years to build, without tearing it down before the new infrastructure is in place to replace it. At some point, there will be redundancy, and economic forces--private reluctance and public gridlock--to constrain the expenditure of much capital on investment in alternative, "soft" energy solutions, especially while there is still so much unamortized 'capital' in the "cheap" energy infrastructure.

As The Cookie Crumbles: Quack-Thump

2012-01-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

Hola Hippies! Paz in el Barrio! I hope you have a good day in view.

Imho: The GOPhux are throwing the presidential race to Obamster. It's still too toxic in the Oval Office...The taint of the Bushevik years did NOT go out with the old carpet. The Owners installed O'bambster to absorb the remaining soilage...It's why I call him President Shamwow.

In any case, they --the GOPhux-- don't fucking WANT it. No, no, no, no...

Back in the Boardroomm they're patient. It took 'em 60 years to get this far. They haver BOTH money AND time (unless the earth's climactic systems collapse). Satisfied with the knowledge that, as the legendary economist J.M. Keynes once remarked, "In the long run, we're all dead," the Owners/Oners appear content to hold the fort til 2016, when they're gonna resuscitate that popular, old Buck Owens standard, Together Again....Yessir, Ladeez an' Genemuns, Bush/Cheney, back together for the the FIRST TIME! Featuring Jebbie and Lizzie...(the crowd roars)

I mean, in other words, I think the fix is in (as I thought in 08, when the GOPhux waited to see if the economic crisis was going to abate and then, when it didn't, named Palin to the ticket), and the whole GOPhux primary campaign is nothing but another installment of the National Kabuki Theatre, performed mainly to attract campaign contributions..

Therefore, none of the "candidates" in the GOPhux Candidate Clown Car--the GOP CCC--is any more than a place-holder, a cypher, acting in a pedantic little drama meant to discipline the rambunctious Rightoids, as the McGovern campaign did to the fractious Left of the 1972 Dims.

McGovern, running against an unpopular, indeed mainly despised Richard Nixon lost 49 states. It struck such a blow against the nascent, and aspiring Left in and of the mainstream Dim "party" that they never recovered, and probably never will, if Sir Barry, the Capitulator, is the apposite case of the fruits of its evolution...

Be honest: NOBODY can possibly believe that either Pistol-packin' Rick Perry, or Neut "the Scoot" Gingrich, nor the ever-frothy Rick Santorum, with the pickled fetus on the mantel-piece, can survive the primaries with any public cred intact.

(Parenthetically: One of the genuinely glorious moments of this campaign occurred recently when Merriam-Webster, the dictionary folks, announced that they had added "/santorum/", a frothy mixture...to their next book. No, really! There's a link...It's just so right I don't even CARE if it's true...)

Perry and Santorum cancel each other ouit, since both are both trying to win ONE faction--the wacktoid 'faithful'--and they'll split 'em. Neut "Til Illness Do Us Part" Gingrich, the stupid person's idea of a smart person, just too dirty, too compromised. Hunstman is still unknown, AND is a Mormon who worked for Shamwwow's State Dept.. Romney has the "Bain" of his existence to explain, if any dares pin him down on it. Many, even on the "left," seem drawn to Ron Paul, inexplicably. Paul is no less a creature of the corpoRat state than any of the rest of them in the GoPhux clown car, the creaky ol' GOP CCC; or Shamwow either, for that matter.

But Paul is particularly toxic, especially for his views on regulating (really, deregulating) industrial polluters--remember the good old days when industries regulated themselves for the public good and the safety of the environment? Neither do I, nr does anobody else...and turning the issue of rights BACK over to the States...I recall we already had a little dust-up, about 150myears ago over that last point, and the States' Rights folks were decisively and bloodily beaten. If anyone's wanna go back and try again, please suck sewage and expire.

But in the end, I don't think it is going to matter, too much. Because of the continuing, lingering stench of the previous 30 years as the Oligarchy eroded and corroded the powers of the People, and in light of the probability of future toxic spills, I think Shamwow's a lock; gonna need his absorptive capabilities.

I wouldn't however say the same about the Senate, which I think the GOPhux can and want to and probably WILL take, whilst holding the House.

Which will leave brave Sir Barry to carry the mantel forward, a 4-year, lame duck.

So follow me to the beach, hippies! Line up! Forward, march. Quack thump quack thump quack thump...

Hippie News * Stuff, Jan. 16, 2012: Soft Energy

2012-01-08T10:59:00.000-08:00

"Psst. Hey! Boy! Yeah you! Tell yer Bosses to approve the pipeline. Nice little deal you got goin, here. It'd be a SHAME if gasoline went to $7 bucks a gallon a week before election day, wootnit?. Knowwaddamean, boy?"

Hippie News & Stuff, Jan 10, 12: Bothered

2012-01-05T17:13:00.000-08:00

You pretty much cannot go into the blogosphere--that seething, churning cauldron of hegemonically mis-directed rage, contempt and general loathing--without reading some variant on the following:

"What HAPPENED to "the America I thought it was," when I was growing up?"

If it's not just misplaced nostalgia, not just empty longing for times that never were, then when DID things start going wrong?

Well, the other day, amid musings on the Pledge(s) of Allegiance, I think I may have accidentally stumbled upon, if not the answer, then at least the date from which I think you can reliably date the recognizable configuration of the decline:

July 11, 1954.

That was the date on which an act of Congress inserted two words--a preposition, and a noun--into a non-binding, sentimental paean written by a radical Socialist minister to the (already transparently mythological) values of the Country.

I think the insertion of those words into that document opened the theistic floodgates and pretty much forever changed the balance of power between the Church and the State.

I think at that moment, the balance tipped, and the Billy Grahams of the world gained ascendancy, and the "noble Experiment" that was our secular democracy was mortally wounded, when that essential barrier was fatally and forever breached...

The two words were "under God," and the document was the Pledge of Allegiance.

It's true that it isn't one of the "founding" documents, but--by virtue of the precise summary of it that it offers--it is undeniably PART of the founding mythology. It also bears the Presidential and congressional imprimaturs. (Which isn't bad for a bit of writing meant to both increase magazine consumption AND the loyalty of immigrant children).

Unnoticed at the time--like the first faint lump of a tumor--in retrospect it seems to betray a really disturbing symptom of a failure of confidence by a country which had emerged from the worst wars in the history of the world as the greatest POWER in the history of the world, and had done so under the banner "E Pluribus Unum"--From the many, One." That put the power in and with the people. With the introduction of the Deity, the power is withdrawn from the people and replaced with "trust" in some absent, unaccountable, probably imaginary Being.

And in that moment, I think you see the origins of the ideological conflicts which now beset and bother and bewilder us almost into paralytic distraction, today.

So, hippies, if anybody asks you where the decline of America began, tell 'em God started it. See ya at the beach...

***********************************************************************
Written by Francis Bellamy, for inclusion in a propaganda campaign to win immigrants' loyalties, it appeared in magazine being marketed to school children "in honor of" the 400th Anniversary of Columbus landing. Before the last addition, the Pledge had been modified three times previously: In 1923, the National Flag Conference called for the words "my Flag" to be changed to "the Flag of the United States", so that new immigrants would not confuse loyalties between their birth countries and the United States.

The words "of America" were added a year later. The United States Congress officially recognized the Pledge for the first time, in the following form, on June 22, 1942:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

It is required that it be recited in every classroom in New Mexico once per day. Most schools have a different kid every day recite it over the intercom. Most states have similar laws. Some states require each student to recite it: Texas, Tennessee, Illinois, Maryland and Mass. ‎"in God We Trust" was foisted off in the Cold War to replace the ancient national slogan, E Pluribus Unum," in almosthe same year "Under God" was stuffed into the Pledge, and for the same reasons: the Red Scare. This is an early example of how a skillful manipulation can turn the national fear into political advantage. We'll NEVER return to "E Pluribus Unum," and it signifies, really the first evidence of the "failure" of the Amercan dream....

HN&S (1/3/12): "Dear Barry..."

2012-01-01T04:58:00.000-08:00

A New Year's message to "My President":

You know the legend that on Xmas Eve, the 'mute" animals are supposed to be able to talk? Part of the same legend is that on New Year's Day we're ALL on First Name BASIS. This is my New Year's Letter to the President.

Dear Barry:

Man, I gotta tella ya, you really, RILLY pissed me off last weekend.

It wasn't so much you signing that NDAA like you did, even though it enshrines in law the NEVER-BEFORE granted 'right' of the President to imprison folks--even your fellow citizens--without trial or appeal...

Or HOW you signed it, in the (metaphorical_) "dark of night," in the news hole on New Year's Eve, on a fucking SATURDAY, no less, when the CorpoRat/SCUM "press" was doing the traditional, ritual bullshit that the CorpoRat/SCUM "press" does this time of year, that they'd had in the can for months so they could go home, too...(Shrewd, bubba!)

AND it wasn't just the 'reservations' which you expressed in signing it--What the fuck, you resisted signing it cuz it didn't give you ENOUGH???Really? It's what you said!

I'll even pass on the "signing statement" when you did it--for which tactic you and all the REST of the gutless fucking Dims routinely and stertorously condemned the PREVIOUS crew of Fucktard Fascisti--

IT wasn't really all that that REALLY pissed ME RIGHT the fuck off.

Though it does.

What cranks MY jaws the MOST is that you not only arrogated that power for yourself which is bad enough, cuz I don't really trust you to use it justly--But GODDAM, MAN! THINK!

You ALSO gave THAT POWER--to indefinitely detain so-called "enemies"--to whatsoever OTHER, future, jack-booted, crypto-fascist fuckwitted fucknozzle who NEXT manages to exploit the system and gain the White House after you're gone. You have delivered all of US to THEM.

No--unless it comes from YOU, yourself, sir--the occasion may not arise in the immediate aftermath of your latest disappointment and betrayal of the people whom you alleged yourself in sympathy with.

It comes into play NEXT term, after you've exhausted your welcome, Sir Barry, and are peacefully contemplating your LONG, serene, comfortable retirement--certainly, nobody in your family will ever have to work ever again--and the GOPhux/Owners have installed Bush/Cheney, Redux"--Jeb Bush and Lizzie Cheney--behind their campaign slogans, blaming YOU for the fall and demanding bellicosely to "Restore America" (along with a whole plethora of other, similarly (and fiercely) nostalgic phrases extolling America's "past glories?"

Why, one might ask, would the GOP rallying cry be ferociously bemoaning the "fall" of the Nation and YOUR part in it?

That's because, sometime in the course of your LAST term--between now and 2016, the PRC will "officially" surpass the USofA in GNP/GDP, and the "End of the American Empire" will be loudly and popularly proclaimed, world wide, in the CorpoRat/SCUM "press" and the blame for it will fall SQUARELY on YOUR greying head (and drip down onto the REST of your "wing" of the Party) and you will be roundly and soundly blamed for it.

And that power you seized, last week?? It verges pretty damn close to preventative detention, which I don't ANYONE to use justly??? It will fall, all juicy, ripe and useful, into the hands of people who don't even care if they LOOK like criminals, thugs, and gunsels, by using it, and they WILL use it, gladly.

So, Barry, mah mayn, I gotta say: HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEAR, and thanks a fucking LOT! Ya done us AGAIN, you cheap-jack, punk-ass tool.

As The Cookie Crumbles: Fully Rigged

2011-12-27T14:52:00.000-08:00

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"

2011-12-22T12:34:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-19T08:48:00.001-08:00

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!

2011-12-15T12:05:00.000-08:00

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!

2011-12-14T12:12:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-13T06:42:00.001-08:00

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

2011-12-11T15:00:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-09T06:14:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

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...

2011-12-05T10:53:00.001-08:00

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

2011-12-03T11:47:00.000-08:00

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.
****************************
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.

>As The Cookie Crumbles: Pain In The Ass

2011-11-29T15:39:00.001-08:00

The thing about pain, hippies, is that it is all YOURS. Nobody else can tell you what hurts, how badly, or what helps or how much. It's like the old surfers' adage: You're the only one in that barrel.

If the complaints by MANY MANY Of my peers --the OLD hippies--are an indication, I am beginning to think there is an undisclosed, disabling epidemic of pain among the middle-aged people of Murka: Dozens of my correspondents have mentioned trials of enduring and trying to stop/prevent sciatic pain. Call it "PAIN In The Ass-Region." And I agree: It's a bitch.

I suffer sciatica in my right leg/hip/back. An attack starts with the sensation that someone it twisting a dull, rough-edged poker deep inside my right buttock. This pain persists throughout the entire episode, but it is augmented and intensified by other attendant discomforts: the numbness, and the simultaneous tingling that advances down the exterior of my leg, down to the ankle, where it seems to cut off sensation with my foot such that, if I'm walking, it seems that I am merely pushing some dumb peg ahead of me.

These sensations persist until I can sit down for a few--mebbe five--minutes. If lucky, I'm good for about half- to 3/4 of an hour before I MUST sit down.

Because of the location of the spot at which the discomfort ALWAYS originates--just about the center of my right haunch--I have always attributed it to the fact that, for most of 40 years, it was on that hip/haunch, in just about exactly that spot, where I carried my wallet...

Which, in the way of those things, grew thick--not with cash but with all those goddam plastic cards and ID. The fucker was as thick as a block of 2x4, sometimes. And just as hard and unyielding. And I casually sat on it, without much thought, until the damage was done...

So now, I'm on a sorta private crusade to persuade men to stop carrying their wallets in their hip pockets, cuz sciatica hurts like a sumbitch and doesn't easily go away, if it goes away at all. Call it "karma repair." Check it out...

I've linked a video which demonstrates ways to stretch one of the muscles the extreme tightness of which very often is implicated in the pain, the piriformis. I gather there's a surgical procedure, too. But I haven't looked into that much.

So I'll hobbling down now, and hope to see you at the beach. Bring accupuncture needles, Hippies...

HN &S: Naming Names (12/12/11)

2011-11-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

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."

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.

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...

Beware: All-Murkin "Heroes" On The Loose

2011-11-26T05:13:00.001-08:00

Lotta folks here in UServille are feeling secure that the US military wouldn't attack the "people."

HERE'S another scummy, reeking, drooling motherfucking shitbucket asswhole in uniform distancing itself from the "people." If this skeevy shitheel is any indication, I wouldn't be so sure.

Read what the shitbag writes!

Woody takes the expression of sentiments like these as the clearest evicence I can think of that certain elements of the USer military would INDEED "fire" on the "people" if ordered to do so...and gladly, without compunction.

Here's another one.

If this moron is to be believed, the Marines are compromised too. I had something to say about this clown last week:

As The Turkey Crumbles: Gobble, Gobble

2011-11-24T08:06:00.000-08:00

With the "failure" of the Super-Duper Defeat-the-Debt-Deficit-and-Screw-the-Poor Reconciliation Committee, congressional approval has sunk lower than what hitherto was the lowest of the low, deeper than proverbial whale shit. Nine percent? Worse than The Obamster; worse than British Petroleum; worse than Iran; worse than pedophile priests! Worse than canned cranberries! Worse than ANYTHING! according to a report released this week by Sen. Michael Bennett, D-CO.

On that same day, one of my F-book correspondents, a smart guy, liberal, progressive, literate, posted some reflections about Congress on his F-book 'wall':

CONGRESS HAS TWO FUNCTIONS: To declare war and administer the power of the purse. Nixon took away their power to declare war with the War Powers Act and Congress just proved again they have no ability or interest in exercising the power of the purse; they failed once again to create a budget and this will have dramatic consequences for every American. The first thing government should cut to save money ought to be the appropriations for Congress. No sense in paying for incompetent waste on a grand scale, is there?

I'm not gonna read it to you. It's on the blog. But, unfortunately, it's sensible, and logical, and measured. And considering the source, an opinion of some gravitas. He ends up suggesting that we just defund Congress, make 'em impotent. And it prompted me to consider again a suggestive confluence of recent phenomena.

Cuz I wondered: You don't really think this all is just some fluke or something, do you? That every public institution of government in the democratic USof A in complete paralysis and disarray? Really? I don't.

I ask, cuz if I were part of same CorpoRat brain trust which is tasked by our compeers--peacefully and unobtrusively and inexpensively and maybe even deniably, and bloodlessly if possible--to overthrow all that bothersome democratic regulation and oversight shit, this is exactly how I would approach the problem: sabotage "democracy," itself. It is, after all, the ONLY force keeping these fascist freaks even slightly in check.

We've talked about an economic "coup" before, hippies...In slow motion. Sixty years, now, and counting. They're in no hurry, nobody's going anywhere. They see to that, too. Where ya gonna go? And it's paying compound interest! No, there's no hurry.

And so, over time, the Owners have slowly but surely been implementing policies and practices which would have the cumulative effect, after 50 or 60 years--which is right now, coincidentally, hippies--of finally and irrevocably alienating the people from their own personal, political sovereignty.

That's the target, hippies: Make us so sick and disgusted with it all that we'll voluntarily abandon self-government. Oh, and the Treasury? Did we mention, the Treasury. Um, yeah, that too. Yeah, the Treasury, yeah...You understand, these things are expensive. And you didn't think WE were gonna pay for 'em didja? Really? Arenjew CUTE!

So by conscious design, a couple of generations ago, machineries and devices and plans and discourses were set in motion which are culminating, even as we eat our turkey and watch football, in the undoing of the ability of ANY instruments, powers, and/or institutions of the State to be employed for the Public good instead of for, or even--the unthinkable!--AGAINST the private, monopolizing, corpoRat interests.

Remember sophomore Civics? The three "branches" of govt: Executive, Legislative, Judicial. Ring bells, hippies? They've been taking the Gummint apart, one branch at a time, since 1963, when they assassinated JFK.

What, you think that WASN'T an "inside job?" They murdered Camelot, quite consciously, as an object lesson to chasten the people still chuffed from victory in World War II, and to warn their kids: Eh, you ain't so to hot; don't get your hopes up. (Likely, the proximate cause was JFK's dismissal of Allen Dulles from the CIA, but it could have been anything.) Johnson installed the Great Society on JFK's gravitas, memory, and mythology. But he got Vietnam, too, in thanks for his troubles, and it broke him.

Then they put Nixon in, and we know what happened there: the high crimes and misdemeanors, his own obvious disingenuousness, his war, his agents, his treachery, and his near impeachment. Spiro Agnew!?! Carter was set up and swept aside as inept.

Then came the Reagan regime's wholesale corruption, unprecedented in the the Century, possibly, beginning even BEFORE the election with their negotiations with Iranian mullahs to prevent Carter from winning the release of the embassy hostages before the election, and extending comprehensively throughout the rest of their tenure: the arms-for-hostages scandals, and the Contras scandals, Oliver North, Salvadoran nuns, and the rest. The honored and beloved Gipper presided over the most egregiously corrupt regime since Taft, at least. By the time GHWBush pledged by his own lips No New Taxes, public trust in the Presidency was as shattered an illusion as the fucking tooth fairy. Bill Clinton was almost a more efficient REPUBLICAN president than GHWBush. He ended welfare as we know it and celebrated the repeal of Glass-Steagal, after all.

Along with the Presidency, naturally, went the trust in the bureaucracy, which Reagan's gunsels also undertook to destroy and diminish from the start. Remember his catchy phrase, telling us "the nine most feared words--I'm from the Gummint and I'm here to help." Both Bush regimes Chimperor Bush's as well as Poppie, installed cells of subversive, anti-government, and in the latter's case, Christo-theistic ideologues whose sole and only reason for existing is to clog up the internal works of the legitimate functions of the State from the inside...They're saboteurs.

I spend more time on the presidence because it it the more prominent, the more iconic institution. But the other two have been reduced, too.

The ideological corruption of the SCROTUS--and by extension, the whole judicial edifice--was displayed once and for all in the Bush v. Gore decision ending the Florida recount in 2000 and ensconcing the Chimperor Bush in the WhiteHouse, as the official sock-puppet of the PNAC and the banks. Sandra Day O'Connor, already planning her retirement to care for her ailing husband, told confidants that she didn't intend to have her replacement named by a Democrat. Since then, the Opus Deists--Roberts, Thomas, Scalia and Alito, abetted crucially by Edwin Meese protege Kennedy--have effectively compromised whatever was thereafter left of the previously vaunted neutrality and integrity of the SCROTUS. And with SCROTUS compromised, what's left of the rest of the Federal courts' authority?

Now the Congress, the third branch, is getting its treatment. Either because the Super-Committee could not reach agreement on the chore set it by the Shazamster, or for some other, equally plausible reason, what little approval Congress has enjoyed--and it hasn't been much--has swirled right into the bottom of the tank. So, finally, and now, a "Do-Nothing/Know Nothing/Pass Nothing" Congress is regarded approvingly by a mere nine percent of the people, who appear to be seeing through the Oligarchic kabuki.

So all three branches of the state are weakened. We should ask that old Ciceronian, double dative kicker: Cui Bono

Truth, here: Against the power and might of the CorpoRats, the only friend you have is the State. Hence the corpoRat fixation on and obsession with undermining and subsuming it. Yet, in the words of the renowned/reviled Robert Ruark, in around 1965, already: "Nothing works, and nobody cares."

In whose interest is this incipient collapse? Now, as it all grinds down, and the infrastructure slowly crumbles, and obesity and disease envelope the "people"--those poor, medicated, dedicated, terminally confused, ignorant, distracted, impoverished, desperate, incurious citizens, along with the drooling morons, ranting imbeciles and prancing fucktards--whose interests are served by a people who will be EAGER to renounce the troublesome, contentious, dirty business of self-rule, and will be HAPPY to turn it ALL over to the tender mercies of the Oligarchs in their boardrooms?

And, now, it seems, all the pieces are in place.

The primary piece, if we were honest is that here you got a "Negrow" in the WhiteHouse. No 'white" person--not even Ralph Nader or another Kennedy--could supply that particular grade of irritant. He is sand in the fillings of the Limbaughs and the rest of the slithering Rightards...But the Obombster's still LOVED by around half the people, if loathed by the rest. A POLARIZER, no matter that he casts himself as a compromiser and a conciliator.

I think his "reelection is assured by the fact that he's been so good to the Owners already that, even though they complain (for chops--so the proles don't get the wrong idea), it sounds pro forma and insincere.. But the surest index of this fact is the mediocrity of the caricaturish clowns on the stages of their candidates' debates.

Truth, hippies: The Point-One Percenters have seldom done BETTER than with Sir Barry, the Nutless, at the helm. The very impossible mediocrity of the candidate pool itself BELLOWS to me that they plan to throw it, after a plausible effort, like they did in 08. So that "America's First Black President in fact PRESIDES over the inevitable, foreseeable moment--inevitably, like seasons--within the next five years, when China's economy surpasses that of the US, and the pundits proclaim the end of the Murkin Empire.

De Massas don' wanno WHAHT pusson takin' de faw fo' dat, no way, nossuh!

The "fall" of the Empire will be dropped directly into the laps of the "Leftists," the Soshilists, the "coloreds" and the rest of the marginalized, authentic democratic constituencies. Thus spelling effectively the exhaustion of the possibility of any subsequent effort to gain and hold power, by anyone even remotely associated with "progressive" politics.

"We trahd dat soshulism shit widdat damn Negrow, an it din't work wort' a damn...Gummint needsta run lahk a binness..."

And THAT's "Mission: Accomplished!" statement, right there, in a nutshell.

And as the nation and way of life we have know begins to disintegrate, it's fair and just to remember it's not "Obama's Plan." He is merely the designated agent. The plan "belongs" to the CorpoRatist Oligarchists who intend to bring an end to all the meddlesome and interferring, unnecessary and EXPENSIVE regulation by bringing an end to the democracy that brought the constraints into existence...

And they do THAT, hippies, by making people like ourelves so disgusted we'll WILLINGLY relinquish our rights for their "security."

Anyway, that's how it seems, from down here at the beach...Gobble, gobble, hippies!..

Thanksgiving With Arlo---

2011-11-24T05:57:00.001-08:00

As The Cookie Crumbles: Frame Up

2011-11-22T05:25:00.001-08:00

‎"Whenever the people are well informed," an optimistic Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "they can be trusted with their own government."

The Doc just LOVES Ol' Massa Tom, mos'o'de'time!

But, of course, where there is a possibility to keep the democratic throngs informed, there is also always the possibility of conscientiously DIS-inform them. The latter of which possibilities will ALWAYS be seized by the Oligarchs, and exploited, to advance their interests.

Some wag once said: IN the corporate State, corporate media are State Media.

Under a regime of corpoRatized media, in which the CorpoRate media and the State media become intertwined and indistinguishable--become, in Althusser's words, "Institutional State Apparati"--it is impossible for a whole people to BE "well-informed" because the propaganda interests of the State are such that complete disclosure, or full information are detrimental --shit, they're bloody ANATHEMA--to the agendas of those in charge.

Which is what ALWAYS happened/happens, Jefferson's ill-placed 'optimism notwithstanding.

I REALLY admire George Lakoff, too. In many ways, I regard him as a latterday Jefferson.

His book, in the 80s, "Metaphors We Live By," should be read to every child in the cradle, and annually after that.

But he--like Krugman, and Reich, and so many others (Thom Hartmann, e.g.)-- are REQUIRED to appear to uphold the myth.

It's his JOB. He's a member of the "coordinator" class, so he takes his livelihood from the top of the system it's his job to gently criticize. He CANNOT attack any hegemonic applecarts. His job is to "reform" the system from within.

He's right as rain about "frames," of course.

You knew exactly what kind of shitty, skeevy, treacherous, lying fuck Shazama would be when he never even raised a peep to challenge the Owners' frames, but accepted them as he performed his governing discourse INSIDE the GOPhux frames.

If you had paid no attention to ANYTHING else, when Obombster started talking about "entitlement reform," he gave the game away. Even a sea-urchin would have had the cranial capacity to figger it out from there.

Briefly, on another matter: Last week I ranted about both the rhetorical and the legislative futility of the Udall-Bennett amendment to permit Congress and the states to regulate campaign financing and thereby to circumvent SOME of the consequences of the Citizens United ruling in 2010.

The legislative futility is still as factor, but at least an amendment HAS been introduced which WOULD actively and actually DEPRIVE corporations of their ill-gotten, and ill-used "personhood" perqs: Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced an amendment that would ban corporate money in politics and end corporate personhood once and for all.

Deutch’s amendment, called the Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy (OCCUPIED) Amendment, would overturn the Citizens United decision, re-establishing the right of Congress and the states to regulate campaign finance laws, even up to outlawing for-profit corporations to contribute to campaign spending.

Now THAT'S my kind of language.

It may still be futile, electorally, but it won't be useless in the event it should succeed. I'll take that, to the beach, hippies...

As the Cookie Crumbles: Amended Development

2011-11-17T05:43:00.000-08:00

A little while back, my Sen., Tom Udall, and Colo. Senator Michael Bennett (not, perhaps significantly, Tom's cousin, also a Colorado Senator of the Dim persuasion) introduced into the Senate a measure which would set in motion the process of amending the Constitution in ways that the sponsors say are designed to mitigate the effects of the US SCROTUS' 5-4 decision last year, that bestow individual personhood on corporations by endorsing for them--in the Citizens United case--the same right of speech in political campaigns which had previously been affirmed for individuals.

(That's prolly the longest sentence you're likely to encounter today, hippies; but this is "Woodyville," capitol of the Land of Long Sentences.)

It would be, I think, an enormous understatement to say this decision will have more, and more enduringly baleful, destructive, corrosive effects than Bush v. Gore, in 2000, which ended the Florida recount and ensured the Chimperor his first term, and which provoked the Nation's running jump onto the horns of evangelistic, Right-wing, All-murkin, neo-fascist perdition.

In the aftermath of CU decision, as its obvious, evident, predictable effects played out in 2010's elections--and as it bids fair now, again, to overwhelm the process in 2012--the "best minds" of a leftish persuasion have been struggling to find ways to 'get around' the SCROTUS ruling.

The problem--which should be apparent to even an earthworm--is that the only ("legal") expedients are all "legislative," in that they entail 'electoral' remedies, such as the passage of legislation, or the enactment of a Constitutional amendment, such as the one proposed by Udall and Bennett, on the other day.

We all agree (well, not ALL) that the biggest source of the corruption of our political process has been the conquest of the whole political system by private/corpoRat interests and financial influence, right down to the proprietary software in the tabulators that "count" your votes.

So, here's what I want to know...I'm gonna ASK this VERY slowly, clearly, and distinctly:

How does one amend the constitution to get private money out of politics when the private money already IN politics will certainly oppose it with every resource at their disposal, which are virtually unlimited and already unbounded, and include already owning out-right or effectively controling all the machineries, personalities, and institutions which would have to cooperate to get private money OUT of politics?

(That might be the second longest sentence and the longest question of they day, nest paw, hippies?)

According to the wire stories on the introduction, the proposed Udall-Bennett amendment..."doesn't directly address the justices' (insupportable, probably suborned) legal "finding" that "corporations have a right to free speech that was curtailed by election law." Instead, it would add to the Constitution language that says Congress and the states can regulate campaign contributions and expenditures.

I'm dreadfully sorry, but that somehow doesn't sound all that much of an improvement, to me.

Okay. Under the proposed amendment, States "could" regulate campaign financing expenditures.

But why or how WOULD they, when the SAME corpoRats who now exert a choke-holds on political discourse would be--ARE NOW--free to exercise EXACTLY the same baleful, corrupting, corrosive influences at the State level with which they have infected the National one.

Think about it. It's probably gonna be LOTS cheaper and EASIER to buy off State officials than national ones. That's cuz the costs of getting elected and maintaining a political establishment are lots lower in Santa Fe or Bismark or Columbus, so the bribes don't have to be exorbitant.

If Jack Abramov's right in his recent revelations that virtually EVERYBODY in office in DC is either bought or available, it is SURELY the that one can buy ANYBODY in ANY "state" gummint for a mere FRACTION of what it would cost for the services of a US. Rep, much less a Senator. And they, like their national colleagues, are ALL for sale, IF THE PRICE IS RIGHT!

On top of that, the scrutiny by the electorate (or the lap-dog "press") is less intense and easier to evade.

State judges are the key. They are usually elected, and they are essential tools to successful, corpoRat coups d'etat, as the corruption and despoliation of the SCROTUS proves, in the macro-scope: take the Judiciary, and EVERYTHING ELSE is possible.

So save yer sheckels, and "C'mon Down, Hippies."

I'll see ya at the beach...

As The Cookie Crumbles: Matter of Degree

2011-11-16T09:55:00.000-08:00

Along with throwing a papier-mache life-raft to home-owners already underwater, and floundering, in a sea of credit malaise, St. Barry, the Capitulator, tweaked the terms of SOME students' loans, lowering interest rates and lengthening terms. As someone who borrowed freely when the loans were plentiful, back in the day, I know the burden.

But back in the day, there were jobs with the wages/salaries from which you could pay them back, albeit slowly and interruptedly.

But bad as it was then, the plight of the student forced to borrow for their education is even worse today. And, paradoxically, it seems the PRICE that students increasingly have to pay for their "degrees" is inversely proportional to the actual VALUE of the credential once it is awarded.

The verity of this observation is attested to by a recent report which compared the value of a "college education" with that of a new car, and found the car actually, though only marginally, superior in durability value.

That, in no small part, is because "college degrees" have become a spurious requirement for about 60% of the jobs for which they're now pre-requisites. As the number of actual jobs has been declining, the qualifications for acquiring one of the scarcer and scarcer jobs have become more difficult to achieve, depending on any given individual's position on the social scale at the start. Requiring a degree for just about any position helps "keep the riff-raff out," too, because it provides another layer of "legitimate" exclusion.

It is also, again in no small part, because the whole system, it seems to me, has been cheapened and diluted by the plethora of trivial crap in which colleges and universities now offer "degrees." The paramount case of which, in my humble estimation, is business administration. "Office management?" What kind of a degree is that? What classics of the field could someone NOT in the field read with pleaasure and understanding?

And finally, they've been cheapened by their commodification by the recent explosion of proprietrary "colleges" like Kaplan and Phoenix, which essentially SELL their degrees if you can provide the cash in an atmosphere of consumerist, cash-and-carry-ism.

Did you know the University of Phoenix gets over 80% of it's $$$$ from veterans? That the majority never graduate with any meaningful professional skills? That the federal money from veterans does not count against the amount of federal money they are allowed to take in? The the for profit college gold mine is a huge supporter financially of Obama? That any regulations are mostly nonexistent? One more way to screw those least able to protect themselves. Desperation--long-term unemployment, a family, and dim prospect--inhibits clear thinking and decision making. ANY opportunity can look like salvation.

But evidence leaves one with the conclusion that ‎"Proprietary" colleges are nothing but junk degree mills, too often. Retail outlets for trivial credentials. The claims of the few folks in their ads notwithstanding, many investigations have reported that an embarrassingly SMALL number of the "graduates" of such programs do much more than increase their debt load.

That's the "price" of commodifying "education," by 'credentializing' every possible kind of job. And, as I noted before, it provides another level of social "filter," to keep the undesirables out.

It's been this way, though not nearly so blatant or obvious, for 20 years. Higher Ed has been so commodified and consumerized that it's essentially become worthless as a pedigree for dogs.

My (paid) professiorial career ended in 2000. For the previous decade at least, it had become obvious to me that students had come to regard their teachers as something akin to "knowledge clerks," paid minimum wages to fetch their "education" from the well-stocked shelves, as if it were a video game or a pair of jeans. The idea that they would actually be involved in the creation/generation/evaluation of NEW "knowledge" never even crossed their docile, bovine minds. They were there, like trained livestock, becazuse it was it was the next/last hoop they'd have to jump through before they began the process of jumping through more hoops, for pay.

I taught at big, highly regarded state schools. A plurality of my students were "legacies," whose parents had sufficient resources to send their progeny to any school the kids could get into, and they stayed home. A large percentage of the students I observed, and with whom I interacted, wanted nothing from "college" more than getting their prejudices ratified, and their tickets to the middle class punched.

They were there to "get" an education. they hadn't the faintest notion that they were actually supposed to make it themselves. Your education is like an artisan's tool-box. It contains the tools you've already made, and the templates for the ones you'll later need.

HN&S (11/14/11): Resemblance

2011-11-15T07:20:00.000-08:00

Woody's all ROTFLMAO! When I saw that Newt Gingrich was calling on Herman Cain to answer the charges by women who claim he--Cain--assaulted them.

Dat's funny: The used condom calling the anal plug scummy?

But if Herman Cain is a serial rapist? That's not funny. He wants to be President, so he says.

Rape = Sex procured under coercion...Or, is there something I'm missing??

Cain used his power to coerce women into sex with him, demanding--in one case we know of--that an applicant for a job as a lobbyist with the NRA (No, Not that one, though...) perform oral sex on him in exchange for the position (erm...so to speak)

So there really is no other possible construction to put on it. Five women whom Cain has allegedly abused (or more) have come forward. There are probably five DOZENS more, over the course of his life-long career of seeking power and then abusing it to assault women with impunity. Women who cannot (or dare not)...resist, or report him....

(What, you think he just started this shit in 1998, and abruptly stopped?? He's been pulling this shit since he was a young man! And he hasn't stopped, either. Think about that French dude from the IMF who was caught raping the third world one hotel maid at a time.)

Herman's problem: He "cain't" keep his dick behind his zipper.

Plus, he sounds, and he behaves, and he comports himself as SUCH the perfect, buffoonish, fast-talking caricature of the stereotype, power-hungry, pretentious, parvenu black pimp, you gotta wonder why the GOPhux keep him around, unless it is in fact because he is.

Ol' cynical WOODY, he figgers the GOPhux are using Cain to remind their "base" about the prevailing myths about black men, and why they detest and fear 'em.

They can't use that lever against Shamwow, cuz he's careful and circumspect...You listen to Obomster, why, y'd Aw-most think he was a "Whaht Mayn!"

But in GOPhux political epistemology, one black's pretty much the same as any other. Cain reminds the Whites--the rednex, crackkkers and tea-baggers in the GOPhux base--that "they all look alike."

Anyhow, that's how ol' Woody sees it, down here at de beach, hippies...back to Mah pal, Win-stone, in Hippie Central.

As The Cookie Crumbles (11/11/11):Pale Chartreuse

2011-11-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

It's been over 18 months since BP and Halliburton presided over the worst environmental catastrophe in the HISTORY of the USofA, and the world watched in dread fascination as the civilization's heedless need for fuel delivered yet another blow to the global ecology as a whole.

Why is no one asking St. Barry, the Hopeful, the necessary, relevant questions, "even as he plans to grant NEW licenses to commit MORE ecocide?

Questions like: How will it be possible to prevent what happened in the Gulf of Mexico from happening in the Beaufort Sea, when all the same players are in place, again?

Where are the DoJ/EPA criminal prosecutions of the major corporations responsible for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Shouldn't that be settled before you grant the same miscreants MORE chances to fuck up?

Where are the prosecutors and investigations, and grand juries around the deaths of the workers?

Why is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not seeking prosecutions of the major polluters?

What are they doing, Instead??

Echo answers: Well, for one thing, they're coming down on whistleblowers like they were Arab terror cells. And those who support whistleblowers. And silencing the science. And buying off critics, or impuning their motives. Helping the polluters, in some cases to shut-up unruly locals and experts by threats and intimidation, where bribery won't stop it.

Meanwhile, the corporate miscreants--the liars, and corner-cutters, and late-night dumpers-- are still unfettered by anything like a social conscience, or any new, significant regulation, and they have set out to do once more in the delicate, fragile, vital Arctic oceans and permafrosts--with ENTHUSIASTIC Presidential support and endorsement--what the fuckers so baldly and blandly did in the Gulf of Mexico last year, and in the S. Timor Sea, in 2009. They're the same fuckers.

I believe that when St. Barry, the Capitulator, abstained from putting in even a pro forma appearance while the 12--15,000 conservation voters were encircling the WHite House, it should have told you ALL you need to know about Shamwow's "green" sympathies.

The world runs on carbon-fueled energy.

The carbon-energy corporations hold the whip-hand.

Obamster has no more discretion about such matters than a crossing-guard can control traffic: He can wave a sign but if they don't slow down, there's not jack shit he can actually DO,even if he WANTED to, which he DOESN'T.

St. Barry, the clean, wasn't chosen for his current position because of his 'bravery,' or 'initiative,' or 'imagination.' He was (s)elected because he was/is RELIABLE to the OWNERS." The CorpoRat Apple-Carts are safe with him, or he wouldn't BE there.

So save your breath. They're gonna drill (and spill). They're gonna build that big, filthy pipeline, and it's gonna fuck stuff up, good. They're gonna build more nuclear plants.

Hey, it's MODERN TIMES, hippiez!

As the Cookie Crumbles: Pretenders

2011-11-09T07:10:00.002-08:00

I sher do wish Krugman and Reich and all the other MSEz (MainStream Economistz) would stop PRETENDING to be 1) surprised! or 2) shocked!, or 3) dismayed!, or 4) upset!, or 5) disturbed!, or 6) otherwise confused! when the GOPhux AGAIN refuse to act or negotiate or bargain in "good faith." There was a perfect example of the art in on Krugman's blog at the NYTimes, recently.

By NOW, this appallingly transparent duplicity CANNOT come as--or be represented as--some fucking "SOO-PRAHS!" anymore. It strains credulity to the snapping point. The GOPhux have NOT given ANY indication AT LEAST since 1981 that they have ANY intention, whatsoever, of EVER acting in "good faith" with the Dumocrats, as equal, co-governors, ever again.

The deal that once prevailed--where everybody at least pretended the other guys were just as able as they were to govern--was abrogated, consciously, by the GOPhux, beginning probably with Nixon; but it became official policy under the Raygunners. It was a coup d'etat, and it's over.

Krugman and Reich, and the rest of the MSEz still HAVE to pretend to NOT see the pretense they're paid to preserve, and maintain the necessary illusions. That's their job, for which they are handsomely remunerated.

But don't YOU be deceived, hippies...

Interestingly, and speaking of deceit...Jack Abramov, the uber-lobbyist whose eye for corruption finally o'er-spanned his ability to disguise it, and who subsequently spent some time in jail for his appetites (a fate which I'm sure others of his ilk--Luntz, Ralph Reid, Grover Norquist, among them, would find salubrious) has broken the omerta-like silence about the operating conditions and operant understandings and arrangements in your typical, well-financed, well-connected, right-wing K-Street bribery...I mean, "lobby" shop.

The trick, apparently, when you're a lobbyist trying to secure the sympathies of any given Congresscritter--was then (and presumably still is), to recruit a key members of the Critter's staff as FUTURE employees of the lobbyist's multi-billion-dollar-booking operation.

And NOT to exchange anything but telephone numbers, as long as the recruit was still in "public" service, along with the "understanding" that the career of the Congressional flunky who played along was secured when they went out the revolving door.

Deferred compensation, I guess you'd call it, by the lobbyist; an "investment in the future" for the staffers.

It was SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), and an EVERYDAY occurrence in Abramov's shop, which was one of the most successful, and wealthiest, and therefore would have been a MODEL for all the other wannabes on K-Street.

How does one cleanse such Stygian filth? The Potomac doesn't run swift or full enough to flush away the accreted SHIT in Congress and the industries designed to control it.

Napalm?

Like Stokely said, the fire next time?

Whadda you think hippies. We can talk about it when I see you at the beach.

Oh, yeah: The so-called "giving season" is fast upon us. The WWH comp'ny store has cool stuff with which to assuage your potlatching impulses.

As The Cookie Crumbles: The Capacity for Mendacity

2011-11-07T06:18:00.001-08:00

A lot of folks will remember a song, or at least the sentiment, that "it's a sin to tell a lie."

It's not lying, per se--or, at least not ALL lying--which the world's 'great' religions forbid.

It's one special kind of lying, at least in the 10 Commandments...

"Thou shalt NOT bear false witness against thy neighbor."

Says nothing about denying you're banging your sister-in-law, or the pool-boy, or lying on your tax returns.

It does prohibit SLANDER, however; That's the "bear false witness against a neighbor" part...lies about others.

Which makes sense, as a social condition.

Nobody can prevent or prohibit most lies.

But lies about others are a danger to social cohesion.

So we deplore liars. Don't want anything to do widdem. Check the "Personals?" Folks don't want liars calling 'em. NO LIARS NEED APPLY!

So why does the "Big Lie" --the "Jewish problem," WMD in Iraq, Hope&Change, indeed, kapitalism in general--work?

The "Big Lie" propaganda mechanism is based on the central insight that despite our ostensible socialization to tell truth, everybody DOES lie, sometimes. And that they mostly are reluctant to be caught at it, so they only lie about little shit, lies they can walk away from, trivial shit--age, weight, spouse?--which is what everybody lies about.

Goebbels (reading Bernays, 1928) reasoned--rightly, as it turned out--that folks who are socialized with contempt and disdain for lying--no matter that they themselves lie--would be inclined to BELIEVE--or, not at lezst to immediately disbelieve--truly enormous lies on the grounds that the people hearing the the BIG LIES would believe that those telling the lies would have the same hesitation about lying that prohibited THEM from egregious untruth-telling. The bigger the lie, the greater the shame and opprobrium upon discovery.

The "lie," its perpetual repetition and by 'credible' speakers, are the keys to the success of the method--and NEVER doubt its success. The tenacious "Brand loyalty" to "St. Barry, the Capitulator," is one of its indisputable products.

At present, we are in the grips of the propagandistic 'perfect storm' for Big Lies. There are, first, interests and powers which will not and do not scruple to tell them, and employ many, many adepts--Frank Luntz, and/or Grover Norquist--to create them. So there's the message.

Second, we've recently been present at the indisputable "maturation" of the culture of celebrity. The capacity to BE known--which is what a celebrity does--has become the warrant for 'credibility." Being known for being known, alone, is enough to imbue the dreariest, slobbering banalities with the authority of the Mass. The mega-hyper-multi-plex of screens screams to be filled. They don't call it "dead air" for nothing. That's the 'credible voice.

Finally, there is the wonder of the 24-hour news-cycle, 24/7/365, endlessly, on the cabloids and/or the Netz. Repetition. I wouldn't recommend this, I believe it cause your brain to curdle; but people who HAVE watched CNN/MSNBC/Fox/HNN'ETC for 24 or 48 hours report nearly endless repetitions of the same stories, the same themes, the same narratives. If I were a propagandist specializing in the Big Lie, and the technology existed to support it, I'd PAY somebody to build the Internet.

No, really. But I betcha you've heard all this a thousand times, huh, Hippies? We'll compare notes when I see ya at the beach...

HN&S, 11/7/11: Candid Chimeras...

2011-11-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

"Thanks, Winstone! Hangin' Bugs, hangin' by a thread...Hola hippies: Didja ever think about "free will?" Well, I got on the cap with the tassel (and not the vessel with the pestle or the flagon with the dragon, so beware: Philosophy comin'!

As the conditions under which success in this culture becomes more and more a MATTER OF SHEER, DUMB LUCK, I am growing weary of listening to folks who are well, or better-off criticizing other folks who are less well-situated, less "well off," as if the less-fortunate were somehow deficient in industry, or had abused their opportunities. And then proceed to blame the less fortunate for their beleaguered situations because they "made bad choices."

Man, that one pisses me off. And not because I, too, made bad choices. Of course I did. Everybody's made 'em. They're just less catastrophic for some than for others, depending on your social position, usually, and that's just the fucking luck of the draw.

So, you'd be right un thinking I'm not one of those who clings to the arcane notion of "FREE WILL" within his epistemological framework.

"Free Will" is one chimera. In mythology, a Chimera (capitral "C") is a fabulous monster of disparate, unmatched parts; in literature, poets use the word to refer to "an illusion or fabrication of the mind; especially : an unrealizable dream. Free Will is a chimerical component of the dominant "myths" of civilization.

As such, the myth of "free will" mainly serves the Owners by preserving the status quo without appearing to do so. Because "free will" makes it possible for the Bosses, who DO control the destinies of the rest of us, to assign blame to the us proles for NOT surmounting the leaden lots allotted them at the bottom of the social pile and dragging ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

It's part of that whole "you had choices" condemnation process that relegates the littler folks to their positions and provides an explanation for why we/they're still on the bottom when we had those "choices."

AND Which has additional virtues: Not only does "free will" NOT implicate the Owners in the forces keeping people down, but it also actively excuses their predations, since the idea oif free will implies we might somehow resist them.

One has no more "free will" than one has choice of one's parents, or of one's native language.

Ich wird Ihnen am Strand sehen! Back to Hippie Central, Win-Stone!

As the Cookie Crumbles: Downing Thomas

2011-11-05T13:19:00.001-07:00

Is Coke-can Clarence Thomas above the law? Can "Ol' Curley-on-top" flout his turpitude, his dishonesty, his contemptible corruption without ANY public consequence?

We'll see. There appears to be at least one plausible avenue through which to attack his corrupt, venal ass. As with Capone, the issue is via taxes.

The Thomases, asserting the privilege of their rank and position, apparently failed--neglected? disdained?-- to report ANY income for her for 12 years, from 1997-2009.

Funny thing: This coincided with when he apparently positioning himself as the foremost ADVOCATE OF THE corpoRat AGENDA on the Court; meanwhile "Ceasar's" wife was making big bux as a high-dollah, Conservative 'rain-maker,' lobbying, fundraising and policy-wonking with the Kochs, and Karl Roves of the world, on issues that (No, REALLY?) JUST MIGHT come before the Court.

Called on it, finally, in 2010, THOMAS grudgingly filed amended returns, claiming it was all just a "misunderstanding." He'd simply misinterpreted the instructions.

Okay, you might say. It's a piss-poor, dumb-ass, shit-heel excuse, but okay. You've seen him. He could be that fucking stupid.,

But now it's turned out he's not stupid. Not JUST stupid. He's crooked, too. Seems the records show the Cunt-hair Clancy Thomas family accurately and correctly filled in the necessary informatiuon for his wife's employment in EVERY YEAR, IN every position he held in GUMMINT until 1997. Thereafter, for the next TWELVE YEARS, the motherfucker lied.

Every year. It does make ya go, hmmmmmm, donit, hippies?

So a progressive congresscritter has blown the whistle to Chief Roberts, not as Chief Justice, per se, but as the presiding officer of the gummint's Judicial Council, the top oversight board for the whole federal bench. And CREDO--the phone folks--are soliciting signatures from citizens to bolster their complaint to Roberts. There's a web-site, on the screen below, where you can go to sign up.

The problem is, of course, that this path requires that Chief Justice Roberts take the information to the DoJ and that the DoJ do something with it in the way of investigation and indictment.

For which eventuality I judge the probability as somewhere between nil and minus 20.

I'm not a lawyer, nor a legal ethicist, but I do NOT see how, legally, Roberts can decline to proceed and still maintain even the most fragile, most tenuous ascription of legitimacy for himself and his whole Court, indeed to the whole Federal Judiciary.

At a minimum, Roberts should summarily ORDER Thomas's recusal from ALL pending cases.
"Cert" --short for "Certiorari", a place on the docket--on which he voted affirmatively should be revoked and be required to resubmit.
Indeed, I betcha a case could EASILY be made that ANY decision to which Coke-can Clancy's vote provided the determinative margin, or on which he wrote a majority decision, should be immediately vacated, and the entire case should be re-argued.

Clarence Thomas' every breath on the Bench of the US Supreme Court does nothing but further contaminate what is already--at least sinece Dec. 2000--a hellish mash of corporate mendacity and moral vacuity. Til further notice, Ol' Curley's apparently above the law, but he is undubitably beneath contempt, and he drags the rest down with him

Sign the letter, hippies. We'll send 'em from the Beach.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/thomas_2/index2.html

As the Cookie Crumbles(11/3/11): Scandalous, Dahling

2011-11-03T14:35:00.001-07:00

In an article that lowers the "Presidential Achievement" Bar to ever-more ridiculous levels, the fawning, fatuous, ever-obsequious, O'botic O-pologist Jonathan Alter last week joyfully proclaimed the "miracle" the Obamanista regime's of moral purity, preemptively declaring it to be sin-free and "without scandal."

What Alter meant, of course, was that the O'bots had so far managed to conduct themselves without the taint of salacious rumor and/or embarrassing DNA-spots on the odd, young, female intern's simple blue dress.

I guess "scandal," like beauty, is a matter of taste.

Cuz, no, Shamwow hasn't yet been discovered dipping his wick in some willing intern.

But what do you call peremptorily assassinating US citizens without trial, by remorte control?

What about renewing the Bush Tax breaks for the wealthy?

What about the whole-sale, full-frontal attacks on Social Security and Medicare "entitlements?"?

For WHOM would these not be a scandal, except for the "first Black President?"

How about the scandal of the patently unconstitutional "Super (We're REALLY Gonna Fuck YOU Up) Debt/Deficit Commission"?

Isn't it scandalous to be planning for and promoting MORE nuclear plants, even in the light (or "glow?") of the Fukushima disasters in Japan?

Isn't that a scandal that there are 20 MILLION willing workers in Murka who cannot find jobs?

With stratospheric unemployment, what do you call three new "Free trade" agreements? I'd call it the return of the gigantic sucking sound of USer jobs flying off-shore.

Shall I go on?

I'd call it a scandal that he twice extended and once even STRENGTHENED the so-called PATRIOT ACT, which during the campaign he said he meant to soften.

Does no scandal attach to putting back in charge of the economy those very szme folks who so totally fucked it up? Summers? Geithner? Bernanke? Is there nothing even a LITTLE stinky about them?

Is there no scandal in abandoning the labor constituency? How about stonewalling the Employee Free Choice Act for workers who want to organize their work-places? Labor REQUIRES a supportive State to face-down the greedheads and other butt-fux in the boardrooms. But St. Barry's no friend of the working man...

Wouldn't it make you blush a little if you allowed secret domestic surveillance or hadn't restored the principle of habeas corpus, even though you were a Constitutional fucking law professor???? Not St. Barry, apparently. Nope, no 'scandal' there...

What about if you didn't back your OWN Environmental Protection Agency on mountain-top removal, and clean air and water regulations on industrial polluters? Nope. Nothing here, folks. Move along...

I guess there's no "scandal" in the murderous drone attacks which kill hundreds of innocents along with selected 'targets' thousands of miles away, in six different African and Central Asian, sovereign NATIONS? Nah. Nothing important there, folx, keep movin...

Mebbe you noticed, the promised restoration of the Superfund Clean-up tax on polluters hasn't materialized, either. Politifact calls that a "promise broken." But hey, what's another broken promise, anyway. There are so many...

Oh, and by the way: There is a MAJOR issue with Obomber's mortgage modification plan!!

That was the plan they touted last week, along with federalizing the interest on student loans, to help the working stiffs? Remember?

In the fine print, one discovers that if the borrower has one SINGLE delinquent payment over the LIFE of the mortgage, they're disqualified... No really!

Ah, but there haven't been any blow-jobs in the executive office, hippies. No cum-stains on the carpet...Three rousing cheers for that, I guess...

So grab yer megaphones, and we'll sing a couple of congratulatory choruses when I See Ya At The Beach, chers......

As The Cookie Crumbles (11/1/11): Circumstantial

2011-10-31T06:18:00.001-07:00

Jolly little gnome, Bobbie Reich, joked about it recently, spoofing us all with the suggestion that the Obamster would start to put things aright by going to Wall Street next week and proclaiming a program to restore Glass-Steagal.

Just KIDDING!!!! Jeez!

Restore Glass-Steagal doesn't have the je ne c'es pas of Occupy Wall Street, but Reich's quite correct: It should be done.

But even he realizes it's naganahapun...The banksters are gonna get off scott-free, and the regulations that would prevent them from engaging in yet another round of economy-shattering bubbles are NOT going to be re-written and re-introduced; those that are (almost laughably) in place thanks to the Chris Dodd Platinum Parachute bill last year cannot be enforced because the FBI still devotes about 80% of it's man-power to "counter-terrorism."

One bankster got sent to jail last week, but that was for the entirely separate offense of insider trading: apparently the game wasn't satisfactorily rigged for this schmuck. But also, Reich wrote, "Just last week Citigroup settled charges (without admitting or denying guilt) that it defrauded investors by selling them a package of mortgage-backed securities rife with mortgages it knew were likely to default, but didn't disclose the hazard. It then bet against the package for its own benefit - earning fees of $34 million and net profits of at least $126 million. So what's Citi paying to settle this outrage? A mere $285 million. Its CEO at time (Charles Prince) doesn't pay a dime."

Woody reckons, okay: we can't prove, indisputably, that these skeevy mother-fux like Prince, Blankfein, Dimon, Rubin DID tank the economy AND fuck the People, for no more reason than for fun and profit. But since they're the only ones who COULD have done it, and the circumstantial evidence is at least as strong as that which convicted Troy Davis, and since they have prospered so handsomely by it, it is difficult to dismiss the near certainty of their intervention and impossible to grant them any clemency in the collapse.

So, since deterrence is evanescent, but recidivism is permanently prevented by the expedient, Dimon, Blankfein, Vikram Pandit, both Paulsons, Bernanke, Geighner, Rubin Summers, BOTH Koch Bros, and Phil & Wendy Gramm--at a bare minimum-- should be taken hence and their heads removed, and then be displayed atop Pikes in and around Zuccotti Square.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Have you noticed? No more color coded alerts? Right. Who needs 'em when you get your Stiff-of-the-Month, the faux-terrorist entrapment schemes the Feds pull off about every 30-45 days.

WWH ~~ HN&S, Oct. 31, 2011: Mis-alliance

2011-10-31T06:04:00.000-07:00

Some 'authorities' are recommending that OWS should find ways to make alliance with the Tea-hadists, and thereby join the two disparate streams of USer disaffection into one mighty torrent.

They'd lose me, straight away.

Why I'd never ally with the Tea-baggers? My dear ol' Dad, dandling me on his dear ol' knee, imparted this bit o' wisdom to little ol' me, back in the day. He said: "Laddie, ye canna negotiate with 'em 'at wants ye dead and done. Ye've got no leverage. Y'can offer 'em a part, in payment. Tell 'em: "Here's me left 'and. I ain't using it, much. Take that and leave me alone...But they won't. Won't leave ya alone, that is. Aye, they'll take the hand yer dumb enough to proffer. But they want you dead. This just makes it the easier, later. And they got time. Plenty of time.

"And yer left hand!"

Malcolm X said: "...So don’t you run around here trying to make friends with somebody who’s depriving you of your rights. They’re not your friends, no, they’re your enemies. Treat them like that and fight them, and you’ll get your freedom; and after you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you. And I say that with no hate. I don’t have hate in me.... I’ve got some sense.
"I’m not going to let anybody who hates me tell me to love him."

My biggest objection to the whole "Tea-bertardian" phenomenon is still that it has never, to my estimation, been anything BUT an astro-turf creation of Dick Armey, the Koch Brothers, and Fox News, cannibalizing on the still-reeking remains of the lumpen racism embedded in the GOPhux "southern strategy."

I want NOTHING to do with ANYONE who would voluntarily identify as a tea-hadist, or who wouldn't shun them, with me. I feel exactly the same way about the Ron Paul acolytes, the "Paul-lyps," as I think of 'em, feeding on the contents of the Ayn-Randian fanatic's political lower intestine. Ayn Rand, in any guise, brings to whatever discussion in which her name is raised the same considerations which 'coprophagy' brings to the discussion of cuisine.

There is ZERO common ground for agreement with such sentiments, and also zero room for compromise, on the actual purposes, proper structures, and orderly functioning of culture and society. No thanks. Not going there...

As The Cookie Crumble: Underwater

2011-10-25T05:12:00.000-07:00

A story that got a lot of play on the Blog Monday was this one:

"Obama to announce actions on housing, student loans
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama this week will announce a series of actions to help the economy that will not require congressional approval, including an initiative to make it easier for homeowners to refinance their mortgages, according to a White House official."

Winston put it here up on WWH, if you haven't seen it elsewhere...

But Y'r Ob'd't S'v't, Dr WOODY, disrespectfully demurs, in any case: What the FUCK?

I've mentioned this some months ago, and it seems nothing's changed. It is STILL long YEARS--almost 36 months--into his term, and Shamwow is JUST NOW getting around to authorizing "fiat"-remedies for under-water home-owners--and providing a little relief for the deluded proles who were told to "buy an education" to achieve the Murkin dream--to possibly alleviate some of the most draconian consequences illegally inflicted upon them by the depredations of Obomber's BIGGEST BACKERS, the banksters and fraudsters? These measures do NOT REQUIRE CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL!

AND THEY NEVER DID. So, how come it took our Constitutional Scholar President nearly 36 months to figure THAT shit out? And WHY THE FUCK DID HE WAIT SO LONG?

Answer me this, if you think I'm being unfair: What the FUCK was the skeevy, grinning, toothy, jug-eared fuckwit WAITING FOR?

?Time enough for the tame O'bots to arrange their excuses, and explanations, along with the hopeful, exculpatory cries that "It's better late than never?"

I am terribly SORRY, BUT why IS IT BETTER LATER than "never?". "Never" is already here for several hundreds of thousands of broke, displaced, unemployed Murkin families immiserated by the banksters and fraudsters and the "market."

In the intervening 34 months, millions of people have been tossed onto the streets by those same banksters and fraudsters, people who might have been spared that if the skeevy, grinning, jug-eared fuckwit had begun this on DAY FUCKING ONE!

Which he COULD have done. But he DIDN'T! Either he neglected to, through some oversight, or he just didn't WANT to do at the time.

FUCK THIS 'forgiving" crap.

This is the "meritocracy." Either you perform or you don't.

Fuck your excuses for the shitwhistle!

Meanwhile, there's THIS crock of shit: (Post The "Rome" image here)

Which Woody thinks is the deepest, stinkiest, murkiest BULLSHIT!

It wasn't "eight years of madness" that brought us where we are.

It was 50 years of concerted, bi-partisan effort, a hundred billion or so dollars spent to buy the Press, and the complicity of EVERY SINGLE MOTHERFUCKER WHO occupied the office. Remember: Bill Clinton signed off on repealing Glass-Steagall, at the behest of Robert Rubin, et al...(end it here)

Bill Clinton PROUDLY put an end to "welfare as we know it."

And, in case you have had yer head up Obasmster's keester all that time, the last 30 MONTHS haven't brought us one CENTIMETER closer to changing ANYTHING, and the next 60 months, won't either...

Eleventh-dimension chess???

I doubt he wins at "Slap-Jacks" with four-year-olds...

You can bet the ranch on that'n, hippies...

See you at the beach.

Hippie News & Stuff (10/24/11): Eat the Rich

2011-10-24T14:46:00.000-07:00

Hey, Bugs, Got my "scholar hat" on today! Thanks, Win-stone! AND Gaudeamus, Hippies
(Begin Image Here) As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, with its cries for social and economic justice, probably it behooves us to inquire how unequal we REALLY are.

So here's the "Top 5 Facts You Should Know About The Wealthiest One Percent of Americans." Courtesy of rogue economist Ravi Batra:(End OverImage Here)

#
1) The Top 1% Owns 40% of the Nation's Wealth:

Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz noted recently, 25 years ago the top 1% owned only THIRTY THREE percent of national wealth.

How much of the wealth does the bottom 80%--that'd be you'n'me, hippies--own? Only 7%.

#2) The Top 1% Take Home 24% of National Income:

In 1976 they took home just 9% -- which means that their "share" of the national income pool has almost TRIPLED in 35 years.

#3) The Top 1% Own Half of the Country's Stocks, Bonds and Mutual Funds:

The Institute for Policy Studies has calculated that the bottom 50% of Americans own only one-half percent of these investments. That's POINT FIVE...

#4) The Top 1% of Americans Have Only 5% of the Nation's Personal Debt:

While the bottom 90% hold 73% of total debt.

--Allow me to explain, hippies: You/we are INDENTURED servants of Kapital; you/we work our whole lives MOSTLY to repay what we borrow just to stay afloat.--and finally,

#5) The Top 1% Are Taking In More off the Nation's Income Than at Any Other Time Since the 1920s: Not only the 1% of Americans taking home an overwhelming portion of the national income, but their share of this income is greater than at any other time since the before Great Depression.

Here's a little mantra for ya, hippies:

The wealthy make choices: Shall we drive the Porsche or the Benz, tonight?

But the poor make decisions: Shall we buy food or meds, we gotta decide, babe...

I hope you're not down to decisions, hippies...

I'll see ya at the beach.

Back to you in Hippie Central, Win-Stone!

As The Cookie Crumbles: Mission "Creep"

2011-10-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

A fair amount of unseemly triumphalism is again attending the assassination of another world leader by forces allied with and supported by the USofA and our blood-soaked, international criminal, Barack Hussein Obama. You KNOW there is NOTHING in international law about when it's permissible to overthrow a sitting ruler, or to institute "regime change." But the O'bots are gleefully claiming the Bushian mantle of "Mission: Accomplished." (By the way: The deceased looks faintly "Christ-like," doesn't he? But i suppose ANY dead, blood-covered Levanter looks faintly "Christ-like," splayed on the ground like that.)

But what "mission"--for the AMERICAN PEOPLE, rather than the international big money cartels--has he actually "accomplished?" Other than turning the economy entirely over to the banksters and financial fraudsters, keeping the war profiteers rolling in dough, and driving USer jobs overseas with NEW "free trade" agreements which , i f memory serves, he campaigned AGAINST?

We've STILL got 4 or 5 (or 6 or 7, depending on how you count 'em) wars draining the treasury.

We've STILL got (unofficially) 15-20% unemployment (The "official" number is about half that; but the official copunt is flawed by SO many factors asa to make it laughable when reported witha strraight face...)

We've STILL got nearly 50 MILLION people, and 20 MILLION kids, in poverty, and CUTS promised to their meager benefits. The average wage, inflation adjusted is STILL about what it was in 1980. Median income is around 42 THOUSAND, but for the lowest NINETY percent it's a full TEN thousand dollars per year the "median." "OFFICIAL POVERTY LEVEL IS $22, 400 FOR A FAMILY OF FOUR).

We've STILL got Goldman-Sachs running the treasury and the Fed. (Geithner, the Bernank, Daly, and close to 100 other close, financial advisors and officials, owe their loyalty to Wall Street, NOT Pennsylvania Ave or "Main Street.)

We've STILL got millions who cannot get medical insurance. Remember the 44 THOUSAND people it was said died every year for lack of adequate insurance? They're STILL dying.)

We've STILL got NO "green" energy policy. (He ran off the ONLY credible "green" advocate he even brought into Gummint, Van Jones. And clean energy plans are invisible).

We've STILL got no--or at least a sorely diminished--4th Amendment. (Where, o, where has our "habeas corpus" gone?)

We've STILL got more and more GMOs entering the food supply. (And Big Ag--Monsanto, ConAgra, Cargill, Koch Industries--alumni and alumna pervade the US Ag Dept.)

We've STILL got The PATRIOT ACT. (Remember when he said he'd "revisit" it once elected? He did, to strengthen the fucker.)

We've STILL got Cunt-Hair Clancy on the SCROTUS. With a black president and AG, this is the only arrangement by which the DoJ could investigate and indict him WITHOUT bringingf out the cahrges of another "High-trech lynching".)

We've STILL got an out-of-control medical system. Costs are rising faster than inflation, wages, and the GDP combined.)

We've STILL got no national industrial policy except out-sourcing and off-shoring. (He's signing or signed off on FTAs with Korea, Colombia, and Panama this year.)

C'mon! What fucking "mission" has the skeevy, grinning, jug-eared fuckwit actually accomplished, other than strengthening the lock-grip of the CorpoRats over EVERY aspect of our lives?

Don't all try to answer at once, hippies. You can tell me when I see you at the beach...

As The Cookie Crumbles: Portmanteau Edition

2011-10-21T05:33:00.001-07:00

Good morning, hippies!
Prior Warning: There's gonna be a bit of profanity and a bit of blasphemy ensuing here shortly... Just so's ya know!
(Begin BUFFETT IMAGE HERE) There was an image up on the Web the other day, of a kindly, elderly Warren Buffett, proclaiming, modestly: "I' could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says anytime there's a deficit of more than THREE PERCENT of GDP, ALL sitting Congressmembers become ineligible for re-election."

Doncha just love the sound of that? So self-assured, so REASONABLE. Like some elder statesman bringing wise council...(Stop the BIG BUFFET image here)

But Fuck ME Running! Who is fucking kidding whom? What kind of fucking MORONS actually BELIEVE to this turgid, runny shit?

The key phrase, which elevates this discourse from modest, dorm-level, late-night, sophomoric speculation to the level of complete, utter, unmitigated BULL-SHIT is this:

"You just pass a law..."

Ex-fucking-sCUSE ME? What the FUCK! I put this in the same class of moronic, imbecilic, cluelessness as: "Well, all we need to do to roll back Citizens United and revoke corpoRat citizen-hood is pass a Constitutional Amendment."

Just WHO the fuck do you think is gonna PASS that law, that amendment, you drooling fuckwitz?

Oh, yeah! We could fix the whole fucking COUNTRY if we could "just pass a law..." Like: Hey, Mickey, I know, We'll have a SHOW!!!!

That's the whole fucking problem! We CAN'T "JUST PASS A FUCKING LAW." And Buffett and his billionaire buddies are mainly the ones who made it impossible. They spent dozens of years, and millions of dollars, to set it up THIS way, packing the Congress with millionaires (more than half; 66 Senators), so that every deal redounds to their EVERY benefit, and we, the people, can't pass ANY laws that reduce their influence one fucking iota...

GET THIS STRAIGHT! THEY named the candidates, THEY financed 'em, THEY got 'em elected, THEY supported 'em in office...WHY?

BECAUSE those skeevy "congresscritters" KNOW who owns'em, and pays'em, and keeps 'em shittin' in tall "gummint" cotton.

Jeezus FUCK, people. It's the same kind of purblind ignorance--or pretense, it's hard to tell, sometimes--as that which at a distressing number of times appears to drive the likes of Robert Reich and Paul Krugman to their ambivalent conclusions about the power and motivations of the T-baggers.

Reich and the rest do not seem to understand a fundamental dynamic in this equation.

It is this:

The t-bagger contingent is QUITE content if their standards of living are diminished a little as long as, in in consequence, and along with it, the situations of the people they despise as their inferiors--mainly 'coloreds'--are affected even WORSE than they are.

To yer basic t-bagger, the WORST thing about Social Security and Universal Health Care, or any gummint assistance program is that it treats the T-baggers, the rednex and crackkkers who regard themnselves as SUPERIOR to the rest of those whom the benefit includes--EXACTLY THE SAME as the people they detest, and they cannot ABIDE that.

They don't WANT to be thought 'equal" or 'equivalent' to and be treated exactly the same as those whom they despise as their inferiors! And they'd rather crash the program than be regarded as in any way the same way as those "Nigras" and "Messkins."

So they don't mind if their own piece of the pie is a little diminished, as long as their "inferiors" take a BIGGER hit, or preferrably are entirely deprived.

That's just how that cookie crumbles down in those t-bagger precincts, hippies.

Stop by the Store on the way out and pick up a tank top with the cool WWH logo, or a bumpersticker. Those dichoric ampules are pretty nifty, too. We'll watch 'em change colors when I see ya at the beach...chers.

As The Cookie Crumbles: A Very USer Coup

2011-10-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

Chris Hedges on Tuesday had a piece in the Blogosphere about how, after returning from 20 years as a foreign/war correspondent, he came home to the US only to discover that there had occurred, in his absence, a "corpoRat" coup d'Etat.

Coincidentally, I was listening to activist/lawyer/blogger Kevin Zeese the other day--he was a guest on one of the former Air America hosted spots, someone sitting in for Randi Rhodes, I think--who reminded me of the so-called "Powell Memorandum." It was the TEMPLATE for the coup to which Hedges testifies.

It's possibly the most influential document you NEVER heard of. Truly, there is probably not a more influential document in the WORLD, in so far as the shaping of the corpoRat climate in which we now struggle to survive--the world of CorpoRatocracy, Oiligarchy, and fiduciary servitude--than the Powell Memorandum.

Probably, you don't even remember Lewis Powell, either. Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, from 1971 til he retired in 1987--his mission already well underway under the Reaganauts. He cast himself as a mild-mannerd jurist; he was not a high-profile guy, considered a 'conciliator.'

A southern Aristo, Powell drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that described a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society--schools, the press, universities, media, etc--in early 1971, just before Nixon put him on the SCROTUS. On the Court, he was regarded as a "moderate," but the memo suggests his alleged moderation was simply a well-worn, comfortable costume which covered a radical, corpoRatist agenda.

I borrowed from Wikipedia the following outline of the basic premises of his plan, which was based mainly on his experiences as a corporate lawyer who was a representative for the tobacco industry with the Virginia legislature, to say NOTHING of his leadership, in Virginia of the '50s, of strident, official opposition to and defiance of the "Brown V. Topeka," school integration decision.

He wrote the notorious "Memo," privately, to a friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Investigative reporter Jack Anderson turned it up several years later. In it Powell called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding politics and law in the U.S., and suggested among other things, the formation of "friendly" think tanks. Can you say Heritage Foundation? American Enterprise Institute? The Coors Foundation? The Olin Foundation? Etc?

With it's title, "The Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," Powell, a subtler culture warrior than many of his time, sounded one of the opening calls of the culture wars. In shock from the dramatic upheavals of th 50s and 60s, Powell like so many of his generation--Alan Bloom, notably, who was ineradicably scarred by the sight of black men with shotguns outside Columbia in '67--Powell (for this instance at least) shed his reticence.

The tobacco litigations and civil rights actions were his watershed. The previous decade had seen the increasing regulation of many industries, as well as a burgeoning of civil rights laws. Powell argued the "most disquieting voices" joining the chorus of reprobation and criticism for the Murkin CorpoRat system "came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." He firmly resolved to make any further or future recrudescence of such aberrations impossible.

To counteract these pernicious influences, in the memorandum, Powell advocated a variety of expedients which sound strange coming from the pen of a person considered at the time to be a futuere Supreme Court Justice: he urged "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a "purge" of left-wing elements from important institutions, including University faculties and media posts.

In an extraordinary prefiguring of the social goals of CorpoRat State for the next half-century at least, Powell named the main goals of corpoRat propaganda/public relations campaigns: changing how individuals and society think about the corporation, in relation to the government, the law, the culture, and the individual.

Shaping public opinion on these topics became, and would remain, THE major element of the corpoRatist agenda. In pursuit of which goal, the corpoRats immediately began a program of acquiring media outlets, in a process called "press consolidation," which ensured "the People," whom Powell instructed the CorpoRats to seduce and confuse, would seldom if EVER be exposed to ANY rhetoric contradictory to the CorpoRat/Capitalist/Consumerist mantras of the Right.

You have only to look or listen around you to determine the power of the strategy, after only 40 years.

Thing is, hippies, and the thing they want us to forget, izzat the CorpoRats have been planning and executing their surreptitious, stealth coup d'Etat for nearly 60 years. And it's a done deal.

I even wrote a poem about it, called "Don't Eat the Souffle!":

"The fix is in:
"The deal is down;
"The game is cooked;
"The dice are loaded;
"The wheels are rigged;
"The decks are all marked,
Shaved, and stacked, and
"The dealers cheat,

"That's just how it is.
"If it bothers you, tough!
"It's what's on the menu!
"Eat it, or starve.
"The House don't care.
"So just shut up and deal.

"The chefs,
To express their disdain,
For the bosses and the clientele,
ALWAYS spit,
Surreptitiously,
In the souffle…"

---Woody, 2011

An' dat's jus' how de cookie crumble, hippies...See ya at tha beach!

WWH ~~ Hippie News & Stuff: Projected

2011-10-17T15:55:00.001-07:00

The House Thursday last passed a bill that would permit an exception of conscience if a doctor refused to perform an abortion even if it meant the death of the mother. Friday morning the Zuckersphere (or my part of it) was understandably abuzz.

Remember, it passed the House, but that's all. It's not 'veto-proof. The vote was too close. Over-riding needs a two-thirds majority. This is just more fucking GOPhux kabuki for their basest base, and another distraction to the Dims.

The true arbiter of this law would be the Senate.

And even in the unlikely event it passed there, then St, Barry would have to veto it.

Though his actually doing so would depend on two factors, I think:

1) How close to the election it was, and
2) How close they wanted us to think the 'election' was gonna be.

Shamwow's a TOTAL "pragmatist."He'll do what he thinks will get him the "results" he's after.

Really, friends! Don't worry about St. Barry's second term. He's a shoe-in.

The GOP wants NOTHING more than to have St. Barry back for a second term. He's GOOD for 'em. He does EVERYTHING THEY WANT, BUT makes the Dims responsible. It's a perfect arrangement.

If they REALLY wanted to "win" it, they'd have a candidate who, if they "won," would NOT raise the election fraud flags like ANYONE in the Clown Car would.

They'll be happy to just take the Senate, hold the House, and leave St. Barry, the Compromiser, dangling in the wind, there to take the blame for the "fall of the American Empire," which will begin around 2015, when China's economy surpasses the US.

Then the GOPhux will ahve a sure-fire issue for the rest of the Century, or as long as the White majority lasts: "RESTORE MURKA to it's greatness that the Negrow and the Soshulist party destroyed."

A total money-maker, I gay-RON--tee, it, chers.

And a final thought:
Though the analogy is not perfect, Capitalism does resemble cancer, in that BOTH require and promote indefinite, unlimited growth.

In Capitalism, this is called "progress"; in cancer it is called "metastasis.

In both cases, the hosts are killed.

Be Safe, Hippies! Back to you in Hippie Central, Win-stone!!!

As The Cookie Crumbles: Jobless

2011-10-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

Shazama's loosely named "jobs" bill was rejected Tuesday by the GOPhux in the Senate, where the Dims could barely garner 50 (of the 60) votes needed for cloture on the measure. Of course, it was ALWAYS a corpse in the GOPhux/T-bagger controlled House. The only thing you can get 60 votes in the Senate for are more intrusive national security measures and bank bail-outs.

Ben Nelson (DINO-NEB), and John Tester of Montana broke ranks, though it didn't matter; once Reid and Schumer (the whip) realized they weren't gonna have 60 votes anyway, it was strictly a pseudo-event, conducted because somebody was watching..
-
To ANYONE with more cognitive competence than an earthworm the proposal was NEVER--any better than Dead On Arrival. Whatever plusses there were with it, there was ALWAYS a significant negative embedded in the bill: the "tax holidays" and the provisions to increase workers' take-home by reducing workers' payroll taxes.

The payroll tax cut –-an enlargement of one already passed last year in a previous move to appease the GOPhux in the PREVIOUS economic Obama cave-in--is what economics writer R.J. Eskow at the time called a "poison pill." Increasing the damage of the previous 'tax cuts,' the new measure would have taken a 240 BILLION-dollar bite out of Social Security revenues in 2012. And would do the same in several SUBSEQUENT years. It's a 'death of a thousand cuts.'

The Obamanauts SAID they planned to replenish the lost FICA (Federal Insurance Contribution Act) taxes with money from the overall federal budget-- keeping Social Security 'whole, for the time being, but forcing the government to borrow more and further swelling the federal debt to pay for it.

Which would retroactively validated the lies the GOPhux have been telling about the costs of Social Security to the budget now.

This would have the effect of turning Social Security and the Trust into a ploitical football, by removing Social Security from its secure position and predictable funding from the Trust, and throw it into competition for scarce Federal dollars with the REST of the 'discretionary' postulants. This is part of the plan to turn Social Security from a universal insurance program into a discretionary "welfare" program with all the attendant rhetorical baggage that would ential. In other words, a death sentence.

Which, if I may say so, seemed to me to be the plan all along. The Owners and their political lackeys couldn't stand the political gaffe of killing it out-right, so they're killing it a little--$240 Billion--at a time. Brilliant, doncha think?

In my always humble opinion, this would comport with exactly what St. Barry was tasked to do, by his oligarchic financial boosters, in the starting gate: Finally putting paid to the last remaining (though always minimal, inadequate, eroding-- but, to the owners, nevertheless odious and threatening--) provisions of the New Deal social safety net.

And he's getting the fuck away with it, too.

It is PATHETIC that folks believed just because he is a "person of color," St. Barry would be "different" from the 44 White dudes who preceded him. Shazama's "jobs" bill was DOA, from the first instant it was proposed.

But I shore was hoping it would pass.

That's cuz I could then have released the pressure building up in my innards from housing the host of pastel-colored, paisley-printed, pan-pipe-playing piglets that are just WAITING for the legislative excuse to fly out my flapping butt-cheeks and circle the globe playing Bach cantadas in 3-part harmonies.

See whatcha been missing, Hippies?

Swing on by the Store and get a handful of bumperstickers. Those dichoric ampules would make nifty stocking stuffers, if you don't happen to have any legs to put in 'em, too...or a WWH "wife-beater"/tank top to wear so I'll recognize ya when I see you at the beach...

HN&S: 10/10/11: Resistance

2011-10-10T14:59:00.001-07:00

I am always somewhat bemused--not amused, not c-mused, but truly bemused--when I read those oft-cited/posted/repeated, presciently cautionary speeches of Roosevelt, or Eisenhower, or Truman, or even Smedley Butler, about the encroaching dangers of BIG government.

These worthies carefully--even lovingly, it sometimes seems-- describe SOME increasingly obvious, malign, and invidious consequences of this or that the other, institution or policy or event, which always proceeds from the creation, installation and maintenance of some, potentially repressive GOVERNMENT agenda.

They prophetically decry the Military/Industrial complex, or the National Security State, or the evils of massive fortunes in accumulated wealth, which empower private interests with the capacity to overwhelm and drown out contrary or contradictory voices, howsoEVER "popular.".

And then these prophets strenuously, ringlingly enjoin the people to "resist."

And this is where the bemusement sets in, hippies...my head grows heavy and my eyes grow dim.

Just exactly how the FUCK, I wonder absently, do these statesmen--FDR, Ike, JFK, et al--expect the "people" to resist that much POWER??? The Military Industrial COmplex hasn't grown any weaker; the national Security State hasn't grown any less intrusive, and those enormous fortunes haven't goptten any SMALLER in the last 50 years. And resistance ALREADY was damn near impossible, even then...

Resist them?
Who? Got names?
Where?
How and With What? Money is the ONLY meaningful factor anymore. Voting is basically futile. And what's left? At Bunker Hill, at least BOTH sides had muskets and black powder. In the NEXT extreme, we've got 22s and Piper Cubs, and they've (6,000/rpm) 20 mm, Vulcan mini-cannons and F-22s.

No contest! hippies...

But I'll see ya at the beach...

As The Cookie Crumbles: Accomplishment

2011-10-06T09:23:00.001-07:00

I am growing daily more and more averse to and impatient with the smug, snarky reminders of the splendiferousness, magnificence, and accomplishments of St. Barry, the Incumbent; you've seen 'em: his "Two Hundred Forty Four Accomplishments?"

Here's a recent example, en precis:

See what I mean? More revisionist BULLSHIT! While the dung is still damp and stinky, they're spinning it into shapes of their own design.

Let's examine the claims:

It SEZ he "killed Osama." But we have no actual evidence of that. We have people SAYING they killed him. But there were people SAYING they killed him in Tora Bora in 2002, too. There is no physical evidence of it that I ever saw. When they killed Dillinger, the cops posed with the corpse. Nothing like that here; so we can say that's pretty thin gruel to feast upon for heroism and heroism.

Toppled Gadafffi: On whose say so? What gives him or ANY Murkin potentate the right to 'topple' the legitimate ruler of ANY sovereign state. And start ANOTHER war in the Middle East for which we are expending billions of dollars. And then he claims the right to exercise extra-judicial powers nobody EVER said they had before to assassinate an AMERICAN CITIZEN with drone missiles, 10,000 miles away No trial, none of the civilized niceties. Just "Blammo!" What the fuck??

Prevented 2nd Major Depression: Oh, fucking really? Three of my tenants are currently STILL unemployed after almost two years. 46 million in poverty, 20 plus million unemployed, record home repossessions continuing, stagnant wages, diminishing benefits, but record corpoRat profits, banksters awash in money, mergers flourishing and in general, big money is prospering. Anything wrong with that picture?

Then it's BRAGGING that he didn't drown any major cities through indifference and political calculation during the last spate of nature's fury from a hurricane? The implication is that we should be glad he didn't fuck up? How high is that bar? I see crawfixh jumpin' that puppy.(End end image here)

FUCK the donuts!
I WANT THE 4TH AMENDMENT BACK.
I want an economy back.
I want Habeas corpus back.
I want Glass-Steagal back.
I want the fucking wars over. more than anything, I WANT THE FUCKING WARS OVER, you church-talking, skeevy, jug-eared, son-of-a-bitch!
End the wars, and we don't HAVE a financial crisis.
Just end the fucking wars!

As CiC, you can do it by fiat.

Just order the troops to stop shooting and to stay in their bivouacs.

Dare Congress NOT to fund their withdrawal. Analogously with TR, sending the Great White Fleet off without enough coal to return, and daring Congress not to buy fuel to bring 'em back.

Tell 'em you'll just let 'em rot, in Afghanistan and Iraq, if Congress wont spend the money to bring 'em back.

And if the Generals and the CorpoRats and their flunkies, gunsels, and lickspittles then arise and overthrow you, well, fine.

At least we'll know, unambiguously, where we stand and can plan accordingly.

Right hippies?

As The Cookie Crumbles: Uniform

2011-10-05T08:39:00.002-07:00

Friends, Romans, and Hippies, lend me your ears!

I come not to praise rumors, but to bury them. This cookie will crumble by the numbers.

Despite what you may hear/hope or heard/hoped, THERE ARE NOT GONNA BE ANY ACTIVE-DUTY, UNIFORMED MARINES appearing at ANY demonstrations to SUPPORT the demonstrators, either on Wall Street or anywhere else...Not as DEMONSTRATORS!

Nor will the members of ANY OTHER USer Military service, Army, Navy, Air Force or Coast Guard. Nagahapun! Just ain't. --- Well, unless there's real trouble and they're called in for crowd-control.

I served in the USAF veteran (1964-68), and I want to dissuade the optimistic and the innocent as to that possibility, to disabuse the naive and the hopeful (often the same people, unsurprisingly). I wasn't a combat trooper, never fired the gun at anything other than paper targets. But I did EVERYTHING ELSE soldiers do, and that included learning about the UCMJ. Military "justice" is probably a more egregious oxymoron than military intelligence. The UCMJ is its "code." The Uniform Code of Military Justice...well, yuo wouldn't expect a military code to be OUT of uniform, would you?

US active duty military personnel ARE permitted by the terms of the UCMJ to join any such demonstrations as Occupy Wall Street in civilian clothes--though they are usually sternly, unofficially discouraged from it, and it would probably be worth their careers to be photographed doing so...They are also strictly forbidden to do so IN uniform. It's a courts martial offense.

So, If ANYBODY shows up at Occupy Wall Street in uniform, they'll be veterans, not active duty. (There appear to be exceptions made for officers, the more senior, the more exceptional. What they say in the ranks is: Different spanks for different 'ranks'... No officer would go to Leavenworth for appearing in uniform at a pro-war gathering, but that would surely be the fate of a mere soldier or NCO who attended an anti-war demonstration in uniform.)

Strangely, some people DO seem to believe that like the Russian Army at Petrograd in 1917, ordered to restore order among rioters and demonstrators, USer troops WOULD NOT open fire on their fellow proletarians, if ordered to do so. But that's wishful thinking. They have either short lives or short memories. Remember Kent State, May 4, 1970--Four Dead in Ohio...

I personally have suspected that's one of the reasons the Busheviks--especially Cheney-- ordered up the Guard and Reserves to fight the Iraq war: to "blood" them, to get them used to looking at civilians as 'the enemy'; to teach them the mortal amorality of taking orders and to inure them to shooting at innocent civilians when ordered to do so.

Cuz ANY place CAN be a combat zone, and ANYBODY CAN be a suicide bomber, and NOBODY is to be trusted who is NOT in the Uniform.

Shoot first, and whatever happens later is later: THAT'S the way you stay alive and whole. Whatever else they SAY at Regiment, that's what the Sarge will tell you, down at squad level.

Caveat, hippies:

I don't wanna make ANY pretense about being any kind of grizzled old warrior. I'm not. I was a glorified clerk with an NSA security clearance. But I was in for four years, during a war, made my rank, got my medals and shit. It was almost 50 years ago, but not that MUCH has changed...

Okay,then, hippies: Dis-MISSED!

See ya at the beach...

As The Cookie Crumbles: The Old "CTRTW"

2011-10-04T09:02:00.001-07:00

We've all at one time or another idly speculated with the megalomaniac game of "What I'd Do If I Ruled The World."

But the prior question is just as interesting: What do you need to do to take over in the first place?

I've often thought that if I were on the "CTRTW"--that's the "Committee That Rules The World"--and our design was to surreptitiously, but irremediably and irreversibly, fatally undermine the "grand experiment" of USer 'democracy,' and then to corrupt its mythic residue to my own designs, I would radically "problematize" the whole idea of "gummint" itself.

I would aim to make it STOP working. I'd make people dread encounters with the State. I'd make 'em wonder, with every breath, if 'freedom' was really worth it. Is liberty worth THIS MUCH hassle? And I wouldn't have to do ANYTHING any differently than every president since Johnson has done, to foster an increasingly toxic, 'institutional disenchantment' among "average citizens" with their frustrations with their own popular sovereignty.

I would, first, arrange it so that BIG MONEY was in control of the "public media." That's key. Rebels ALWAYS take over the TV stations first, cuz you gotta control the message. You don't have to exert control over every individual's every thought. It's enough to control the 'frames," and the 'vocabulary'--words and images--and the 'trends,' the perceptions. When you've got that much influence, thought control takes care of itself, cuz there's only so much you CAN think...

And I'd turn politics into a circus, a kind of pseudo-sport, like "professional wrasslin'." The wrestlers ALL work for the same guy, the same company, no matter what ostensible role they play in the ring. Good guys, bad guys, they're interchangeable from one night to another. It's just spectacle though, like kabuki drama, which it also resembles, it has a didactic function too.

I would see to it that the overwhelming majority of citizens were irretrievably indentured, through easy credit and/or "home ownership, to the dominant, PRIVATE, CorpoRat/State financial structures--with credit cards functioning as mobile contracts of indenture to the company store.

I would arrange it so that the people elected to 'represent' the interests OF the 'people" would, instead, mainly come from, and PROUDLY owe their primary social , political, and economic fealty to the Ruling Class. My "party" system would be stratified by class, with easily identifiable winners and losers...

I would direct things so that my "Executive/Presidential" officers were both buffoonish and ineffective sock-puppets, who were were as divisive--but as philosophically similar to one another--as possible, thereby serially alienating one, then another, then another, then another constituency, until NO 'president' would really 'represent' the country, but only the interests of their CorpoRat Bosses.

I would exhaust the public treasury with ruinous, futile, immoral, bloody--but small-scale--international wars of opportunity and or avarice; then I'd use the ensuing financial crises enforce 'austerity' on the people, whom I'd use my media empires to blame for their own plight, while simultaneously extolling their "exceptionalism."

I'd unfairly use loopholes in federal banking regulations to dispossess the 'uppity' folks--whatever race/class--of the things they thought they had "earned." Depressions don't hurt EVERYBODY. There's around 5% who do SPLENDIDLY, thank you, repossessing the tchotchkes and gew-gaws--you know, like houses and cars--which the rubes thought they'd bought, but which they would shortly learn, to their dismay, that they had in fact only leased.

I'd blame EVERYTHING on the "political culture," on the seeming impossibility of legislative consensus, and one day I'd spend a couple of million dollars and I'd get together a "patriotic," oath-loyal, stridently moralistic Committee of Private Citizens and I'd pledge to "RESTORE" America,!!!" if you people would just LET me.

I think they're just about ready to completely throw off the masquerades of 'democracy,' and maybe even 'politics' itself, and exchange if for the 'discipline' of the boardroom. No more moral hazard here, you betcha!

They usta say beware the man on horseback; today, it's the demagog in the $15,000 suit and the private jet. Beware, cuz they're the same guy, hippies...

Oh, yeah! OCCUPY WALL STREET!!! and I'll see ya at the beach...

WWH~~ Hippie News & Such: The End of Homework

2011-10-03T17:25:00.001-07:00

You think there's wackloon/Conservaturd fury NOW about the state of the schools, wait til the local Family Research Council or such like gets wind of the NEXT academic sacred cow to gets rendered.

Homework. Yes homework. Homework, that baleful bane of youthful innocence and idle distraction, may be on the academic chopping block.

The attack, of course, comes from the forces of evil, discord and social upheaval on the left.

It's funny: You'd think that by giving kids more of something to do, they'd learn to do it better, wouldn't you?

But the research (there's that word again, drat it!) shows otherwise. Not only does it NOT improve "learning," but it actually IMPEDES other important growing and learning experiences.

One of the folks who've spend the most time DOING the research on the matter is education gadfly, author and critic Alfie Kohn. Kohn and a colleague, replying to a recent piece in in the NYTimes which outlined some information and asked personal opinions about the value of homework, had the following to say:

True, the trouble with homework isn't limited to quantity: it can be counterproductive even in limited amounts. But a lot of it can be damaging even if we approve of the assignments themselves.

We also dispute the suggestion that the only important issue is whether homework advances "learning."

First, the research cited concerns how many facts students can memorize, a matter less consequential to anyone with more ambitious intellectual goals, like helping students think deeply and enjoy doing so. (Homework seems to be the single most effective way to destroy children's curiosity.)

Second, this research doesn't support homework, per se. The critical question is whether children must be made to work a second shift after spending a full day at school. The available data say no, particularly with younger students. So do the many anecdotal reports we've collected of teachers and entire schools that have eliminated homework, with very encouraging results.

Finally, tweaking assignments to maximize the number of facts retained ignores homework's effect on children’s social, physical, artistic and psychological development. We worry about not only the other activities that homework displaces but also the exhaustion and family conflict that it often causes...

Homework serves one very important function, though one NEVER expressly explained by its advocates. It inures children--gets them used to, in their very bones--being called upon--required--to take "work" home with them without complaint, and without additional reward/remuneration.

Why do ya think they do that, hippies?

We can talk about it when I see you at the beach.

As The Cookie Crumbles (10/1/11): Age of "Consent"

2011-10-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

It is not my habit to read extensively from other's texts, but...I make an exception in this case. Old professors never die, though they do get hoarse...

What I'm going to read is an extremely well-edited synopsis of the origins and purposes of what we are at pains today NOT to call "propaganda." Listen, because in here as in few other places, will you hear SO respected and authoritative a voice, SO frankly and candidly discuss the naked structures and motivations of our controlling institutions. Ready? Feel free to take notes:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

The author of that passage, and of the passages from which that account was expertly stitched, was Edward Bernays. The best media biography of him that I know of is in a BBC program, "The Century of the Self," the first installment of which is dedicated to Bernays, Freud's favorite nephew, and frequent amanuensis. Bernays took Freud's general insights into human behavior and built gauzy edifices of the "professions" of "public relations" and "advertizing" around them.

Bernays, a Wilsonian (capital L) Liberal who demonstrated a clearly "enlightened" understanding, but a too tolerant acceptance, of the nature of the political status quo, published those sentiments in 1928, whereupon they were immediately seized upon, wholesale, by Goebbels and Hitler.

(Aside: Capital L-Liberals, I've always thought, occupied the position in the political framework of the US at the time, and exerted approximately the same epistemic authority, as Lenin's Vanguard Intellectuals? The "eugenicists" were capital L-Liberals, too. As were the social Darwinians. )

It was Bernays who coined the phrase, "the manufacture of consent," which Chomsky and Hermann quoted in titling their landmark work in the '80s "Manufacturing Consent."

Television, and its recent flickering, blue-screened scions, such as the one on which you are likely regaring these images and hearing these sounds, are the source phenomena, the inventions, most responsible for the decline and demise of "collective intellect" in the USofA. In consequence, it is VERY VERY VERY difficult to impress upon the 'average 'Murkin' that they are, in fact, mainly responding to propaganda all the time, in every aspect of their lives, to the extent that they are personally involved in a mediated activity... One of the genius moves of the PRopaganda industry was to create the ENTIRELY artificial distinction between "propaganda" and "advertizing"

The most accurate measure of the success of the propagandizing to which ALL citizens are subjected is the readiness of ther 'subject' to repeat the 'differences' between, say, Coors and Bus, or Ford and Chevy, or Coke and Pepsi as if they were "real."
Item: There is a 'real' difference between a ford sedan and an apple tree; there is no (meaningful) difference between a Chevy and a Honda.

Now think again of the template upon which the virtually uniform indoctrination of the whole, mediated reality we now inhabit is founded upon. Now think of it again. Go back. Read it AGAIN! Read it to your children at bed-time. Paste it to the mirror, so it's there when you brush your teeth/tooth and hair...Here, I'll help:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power...

Thought control needn't be exercised by restricting individual expression, when one exercises editorial discretion over the vocabulary, literal and imaginal/figural, in which the common business is conducted.

Bernays was the first person to formalize that insight, and he packaged it in the glistening wrapping of suppressed sexual suggestion which is STILL the underlying discourse of MOST sales campaigns, inCLUDING political ones, one way or another.

If you divide to conquer, what are you doing when you fragment, do ya think, hippies...

See ya (almost naked) at the beach...

As the Cookie Crumbles: Algebra

2011-09-29T05:50:00.001-07:00

One of the insights for which I am grateful to Howard Gardner's theory of multiple 'intelligences' is that it helped me to understand my own ineptitude with mathematics.

Not arithmetic. No, no...I went to Catholic grammar school. I can DO me some arithmetic! Them addin', an' subtractin' and multiplicatin and divising--I'm top o'de heap! I can do three-digit by three-digit multiplication in my head. I had to memorize the squares to 25. Estimating fractions is my MEAT. Everything was going FINE til sixth grade Algebra...

Just as my skill and courage surfing runs out at about 10 foot waves, so such skills as I possess in arithmetic exhaust themselves in "higher" mathematics. Especially algebra, which--for reasons I'll mention later--made calculus impenetrable to me.

"Algebra" is an Arabic word, around the root 'gebr,' which means (among other things) "to straighten." It became a component of the formal mathematics system devised by Arab mathematicians during the flowering of Muslim culture along the fringe of the Mediterranean in the 9-11th centuries, more or less.

The system, designated Al-gebr we'l mukabala, was formulated and formalized by one Mohammed ibn Musa Ab Jefar Al-Khwarizimi, sometime around 830, CE. It was in this way--through the Arabic expansion across the straits of Gibraltar, and in through Italy, that "the West" came to learn how to do decimals, among other things. The Muslim expansion is credited with preserving and developing the knowledge of the Greeks through the Dark Ages of pre-medieval Europe.

(Parenthetically: During the FIRST Gulf War, I recall seeing a debate between an officious, supercillious Brit and an Arab spokesperson for some institution or another, wherein, the Brit accused the Arab of being uncivilized, the arab replied, with wonderful aplomb: Civilized? Sir, WE were doing algebra while your ancestors were still painting themselves blue to make it rain.")

The first time anyone in the English-speaking world would have encountered the word, it would have had the form "Algebrist," and it would have identified the party being referred to as a "bone-setter."

Algebra is basically a puzzle-solving activity: you have a formula (one of the parts of the puzzle is determining which formula you need) and some values, and you have to figure out which values to plug in what slots in what formula, which is always the form "x = (Something). All the homework in the WORLD will not improve the facility of someone who does not have such a puzzle-solving aptitude to do the desired task.

It occurred to me one day that the only really practical application of algebra in 'everyday' life is in another mathematical activity: calculus. Algebra is the "grammar" of calculus. And calculus is the LANGUAGE of power. It is NOT in the interests of "power" that too very many people should understand just HOW it works. There are a lot of KINDS of knowledge, but the most useful is "know HOW."

That's one reason why it's often taught as if the student were a supplicant before the "mysteries." It's because "calculus," (a Latin word, meaning 'little stone,' used in tallying) is the branch of mathematics focused on limits, functions, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series.

Any of those terms ring a bell, hippies? Wall Street bells?

As the Cookie Crumbles: Gamesters

2011-09-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

There was a clip from an edition of the (pretty savvy and useful) "Business Insider" blog from April 30, 2010, going around on the blogs today( linked below). It was revived I suppose because of its relevance as to the mind-set of the champagne partiers last Friday who mocked the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators from their balconies. All part and parcel of the turmoil and potential conflict, the stage for which is being set on Wall Street and environs, that spark being lit perhaps even as I write, or you read/hear these words.

Eighteen mos ago, already, the 'traders' were perfecting their alibis...that of course having been already 36 months into the collapse they engineered and are STILL profiting from. Though they have resorted to it since time immemorial... You know the drill.

The gist of the argument is "You loved us when the Dow was at 14,000. You lived well BECAUSE of us. If you ever want to live well again, go away leave us the fuck alone! If you don't, we'll REALLY fuck you up, cuz that's what we DO: Fuck people up for fun and profit." I won't read it to you, because I'm not sure how long I could retain my equanimity, but it ends in this paragraph:

We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?" Read more.

These are the same, or nearly the same guys--and they're pressed from the same mold as--those ENRON energy traders who cackled obscenely and joked about grannies dying in the heat, as they instigated rolling black-outs all around California in the early Bush years, to drive the Governor from office and bolster their criminal enterprise's books, back when Ken Lay and that crowd was riding high.

Same crowd, even if the names are somewhat altered. The game's trhe same. Same agenda. They're gamblers, in the best way, as they see it.

I'd might be inclined to buy their argument, or some of it, except for one teeny little thing: the outright cheating and associated behaviors as much as "litereally" killed people with less thought than one would spend on a pest that one trod on. Another culture would call that criminal.

They're proud they gamed the system. They regard themselves as the cold-blooded realists, and regard the rest of us as little more/better than dispensable domestic animals to be disposed of as the needs of the owners dictate, regardless of the feelings of the children. It's a hard world out there, and they think--and reward--themselves as its masters.

I accord them all due respect for their accomplishments, though with a caveat: as long as when they fuck up, and get caught, they also pay a commensurate penalty: they get shot, dumped in a hole, and have a bag of quicklime poured in on top of 'em. That's how the PRC does it, with the guys (and gals) who get caught and cost "face" to the regime.

They're right: It's a deadly game. But they're not playing with their own skin. It's our lives that are the chips on the table. They're a bunch of tin-horn gamblers playing with the house's (that's "our") money.

They'd be more careful if they had anything REALLY at risk, cuz though 'deterence' is kind of a slippery slope, it does cut WAAAAY down on recidivism, doncha know, hippies?

Oh, yeah: Go buy a bumpersticker, a tank or a t-top at the store, too! We appreciate your support, more than we can say...

WWH ~~ As The Cookie Crumbles: Entitled!

2011-09-27T05:18:00.001-07:00

The cookie flavor of the day is rich and sweet asnd textured. Entitlement!

I am NOT a financial analyst, or even close. I'm entirely too unserious to be 'trusted' on such important matters. I keep my bank balance in my head.

But even I know that the whole conversation about 'entitlements' is a rigged game, as George Lakoff has been reminding us for some years. It echoes precisely the Righturd/ wackloon/ fucknozzle slanders about the "Culture of Entitlement" that's been the standard rhetorical tactic to attack Social Security and other Gummint social safety-net programs since Reagan and before. "Google" it. It's constituent of the ancient Conservatoid canards about 'moral hazard," whereby it is asserted that it is dangerous to the spiritual well-being of the prolateriat if things go too EASILY for them. The idea is that privation builds character, you know?

Pres. Shamwow SEEMLESSLY adopted that rhetoric--consistent with his own sentiments, clearly, but inconsistent with such surviving "Democratic" values as there still are in public discourse--and conceded the terms of the argument to the GOPhux-- literally within DAYS of his nomination. Doing so was a calculated, pragmatic, political decision, a decision powered by expediency, but it was grotesquely unfair to the facts of the case.

Under most rules, if you have been offered a commodity in the marketplace, and you PAY for it, you are "ENTITLED" to it. A car, a meal, a suit of clothes: If you pay for 'em, you are entitled to enjoy 'em. With SocSec, we have not only contributed to Social Security, but employers did too. It totaled 15% of your income before taxes.

If (your earnings) averaged only 30K over your 49 year working life, that’s close to $220,500.

If you calculate the future value of $4,500 per year (yours & your employer’s contribution) {on that $30k/yr you averaged], at a simple 5% (less than what the govt. pays on the money that it borrows), after 49 years of working (me) you’d have $892,919.98.

Withdrawing only 3% per year, you would STILL receive $26,787.60 per year and it would last better than 30 years, and that’s with no interest paid on the undistributed capital. It's exactly like--in fact, for retirees, it IS-- a life insurance policy you DON'T have to die to collect, and which ISN'T gutted by the high salaries being deducted by the management thieves at the top.

That's how I understand it. If I have bungled it, please correct/forgive me.

They call Social Security and Medicare an "entitlement" as if that diminishes the justice of our claim to it, even though most of us have been paying for it all our working lives.

You want "undeserved entitlements?" Lemme remind you of the sweet deals the Congresscritters have crafted for THEMSELVES:

Cheap, highest-quality healthcare,
outrageous retirement packages,
67 paid holidays,
three weeks paid vacation (Did you know Congress can vote itself a vacation anytime it wants to?),
unlimited paid sick days, and
much much more?

Yeah, that's what I'd call "welfare," And they have the nerve to 'worry' about the 'moral hazard' of my meager entitlement?!!!!Entitlement? You fuukin betcher sweet ass, we're entitled. We paid cash for your social security insurance!!!! Just because the Gummint borrowed money out of the fund doesn't make your benefits somehow evanescent or tentative. Now when it’s time for to collect on our insurance, the government claims it is running out of money.

Oh! You didn't know Congress has been "borrowing" from the Social Security Trust fund for nearly 50 years? Why, you might ask, did and DOES the Congress borrow from the Social Security trust, in the first place? Why isn't it in that thing Al GOre wanted, the 'lock box,' sitting there for the benefit of those who contributed to it?

This answer is much the simplest one all day. One, three-letter word, in fact: WAR!

The Soc Sec fund was and is a honey-pot that Congress and Presidents could tap WITHOUT raising taxes, without leaving any fingerprints. Like the oil, it would NEVER Run out.

LBJ and a Dim Congress began it, as a way to finance their competing wars: the one in Vietnam and the "war on poverty" and other New Society programs.

About 15-20% of the so-called "national debt" consists in bonds created by the Treasure to underwrite those literally TRILLIONS of dollars in loans FROM the SocSec fund over those decades.

And now you, see--funny thing, ain't it, hippies--that the Gummint --the institution, owned bag and baggage by the Elites, oligarchs and Aristos-- actually has a motive to let the system fail.

Two motives, really: One, to cancel that enormous debt, and two, to get their feculent, blood-soaked fingers into that whole, huge, residual KAPITAL pie.

Guten appetit, hippies. See you at the beach...

WWH ~~ Hippie News & Stuff, Sept. 26, 2011: Vetted!

2011-09-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

WWH ~~ Hippie News & Stuff, Sept. 26, 2011

Perhaps history will record that the most "tragic" part of the election and Presidency of St. Barry, the Compromiser, is that so MANY people apparently believed that the melanin quotient in the fellow's skin would/should/could? actually make any functional or material DIFFERENCE. It was strangely totemic reaction, for a 'civilized society,' as if the "coming of the Black President" forebode rare, triumphant, even miraculous events--PEACE!, or JUSTICE!, or something unexpected...like the return of the White Buffalo, or birth of a Red Calf.

This puzzled me from the start: HOW, I pondered, could nominally reasonable, normally intelligent, functioning, responsible, adult people--with jobs, children, mortgages, and other such trappings of maturity--how could such folks REALLY THINK that the OWNERS of the country

--The oligarchs, plutocrats, aristos who were the grist for George Carlin's comic ouevre in the last five or ten years of his life--

would ever turn the actual MANAGEMENT of THEIR "property,"--the COUNTRY and all it's inhabitants-- or the system of its administration --the Executive Department, in this case, the most ICONIC branch--

...over to somebody--to ANYBODY--who wasn't utterly, totally, completely, thoroughly, exhaustively vetted and trustworthy?

Do you REALLY think that someone who posed even the tiniest, remotest, slightest, slimmest, faintest, glimmering scintilla of a CHANCE of undoing the least jot or tittle of their immensely profitable, unimaginably powerful status quo would be permitted to be elected to that position?

No. That's preposterous! Who could believe such a thing? The status quo would have to be absolutely safe in the hands of ANYONE in that Office.

Ergo--in the sense, "cogito, ergo sum!"--St. Barry had already, long before 2008-09, to have faithfully demonstrated to the relevant screeners that he neither would, nor even REMOTELY wanted to--that, indeed, it had actually NEVER CROSSED HIS MIND--to jostle, far less to UPSET, any hegemonic applecarts, or otherwise in any way disturb the Owners in their well-earned enjoyment of the spoils of the good fortune of their birth.

Just sayin...See ya at the beach, Hippies

As the Cookie Crumbles: Law or Justice?

2011-09-23T08:06:00.000-07:00

With all the controversy and conflict swirling around the execution of Troy Davis--a black man convicted under dubious circumstances, on questionable evidence, of murdering a white cop, in Savannah, GA,-- a killing which he denied to the very end having had any part in--it's possible that we'd overlook the fact that there were two State-sponsored executions committed yesterday: Troy Davis, in Georgia, and in Texas, Russell Brewer, one of the men convicted of the hate-crime, dragging death of James Byrd, Jr.

Byrd, a partially disabled black man, was attacked and beaten by three white men whose only motive was racial malice, and who then chained Byrd behind a truck by his ankles and dragged him to his death some excruciating, horrifying moments later when his head was severed from impact with a curb. Russell, a white supremacist, died without any remorse or last words, according to news accounts.

Troy Davis was convicted, mainly, of being a convenient black person who could be tied to the killing an off-duty (white) cop doing 'security' work at a fast-food restaurant. The evidence against Davis was mainly circumstantial, or in the form of witness identifications. Crime-scene identifications are notoriously unreliable. No murder weapon was ever recovered. There was no explicit, physical evidence linking him to the death for which he was convicted and was executed. And there there were allegations of witness intimidation, in any case.

There exists that kind of physically incriminating evidence on Brewer that was not produced at Davis' trial. They found Byrd's blood on Brewer's boots, found his dna on items found at the crime scene. He and his accomplices had been seen picking Mr. Byrd up. One more of the trio is also scheduled to die, a certain John King. The third got life without parole.

I am uncomfortably aware in myself of a certain ambivalence about capital punishment, which I think may be pretty widely shared, and which is perfectly illustrated by these two cases. I am sure it betrays an unwonted elitist streak in me, but I think there ARE some folks who society, through the application of laws, safely dispose of. I wish I could be an anti-capital punishment absolutist, but I can't. When you're approaching 40, and still getting your jollies murdering poor black men by dragging them around behind a truck, you've pretty well exhausted your prospects for social utility, to me...

There were cries of "justice denied," especially in the Davis case, but in a "nation of laws," you don't get "Justice."

Despite the well-meaning and sincere sentiments of the Pledge, We do NOT "DO" justice. We do "law." They are only occasionally--rarely--synonymous, and even more rarely synchronous.There is a really big difference, which should be understood by all who complain when 'justice' is not served.

Law reduces "Justice" to procedural fairness. SCROTUS Justice Scalia declared a couple of years ago that actual innocence was no bar to execution, if the forms were all followed, and conviction accomplished without reversible error. Both executions were "legal." To the executioners, that's all that matters, technically. The rest is emotion, against which "law" is supposed to be an antidote, both to revenge and, unfortunately, to compassion...

But in the face of those ambiguities and ambivalences, I think I can say this for certain:

If I were being executed for a murder I had not committed, and I were permitted 'last words,' I believe I would "NOT go gentle into that good night," as the poet warned. I believe would try to get as far through the following as I could before they flipped the switch:

"You are murdering an innocent man, you smug, self-righteous, contemptible assholes.
I hope that the memory of my unjust and bitter death poisons your every breath, taints your every pleasure, colors your every memory for all the days of your lives. May you NEVER have another day of joy, may your children starve, and may your every aspiration fail. May this malediction haunt you forever!
Fuck ALL of you for killing me!"

WWH ~~ As The Cookie Crumbles: Execution

2011-09-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

(Note: This essay was composed during the course of Wednesday, Sept. 21. I never held out ANY hope that the crackkkers on the Ga. Pardons board were gonna rescind the death warrant. I had tentatively begun it this way: "Troy Davis is probably dead by now...") When news came that the execution had been performed, it was too late to go back to the site-owner and change it.

Good MORNING, Hippies, hither and yon!

Today's crumbling cookie is of a deadly variety...

Troy Anthony Davis is still alive. Apparently the US Supreme Court ordered a delay--not a stay in his execution. This did NOT come from the State of Georgia, even though there was substantial doubt almost from the first moment that he was guilty of the crimes for which he was supposed executed Wednesday night.

Troy Davis was an unlucky man. You just about can't get in deeper shit in the South than being a Black man, with a record (which EVERY young black man has got) accused of killing a cop.

That was "then," 1989, and he was him, and the police in Savannah GA, weren't gonna take any particular care to see that the exact niceties of the law were too rigorously followed, that principles about uncontaminated identification were too scrupulously observed. And neither the DA not the Judge were overly fastidious about what testimony was included and/or excluded. They had a dead cop, and a Black suspect, and that was enough.

The case against Davis was strong enough to get the death penalty for a Black man convicted in Georgia in 1989 for murdering a cop.

The thing was, son: SOME Negrow had killed a cop, and SOME Negrow was gonna pay, not for his sins, but as a lesson to the other, potentially uppity Negrows in Savannah, GA.

Witnesses recanting, accusations of police intimidation, and scores of trial errors, along with the pleas from concerned citizens everywhere, from Amnesty International, and 650 thousand internet petitions, didn't swayed the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. I suspected all along that they weren't going to. As far as they were concerned, as soon as this became a "dang librul cause celebre," those crackkker spines on the Georgia Pardon Board were gonna go all rigid. They'd execute that "boy" if they never did anything else.

More than 60 percent of Murkins still support capital punishment. And most of them would support it it even if they had incontrovertible evidence that the innocent had sometimes been executed, according to a study I saw reported about 15 years ago, in The Nation, iirc. That level of support remains, I suspect, mostly, because that percentage of people do not expect themselves ever to have to face it, ESPECIALLY unjustly inflicted.

Cuz that sort of thing just doesn't happen to "our kind" of people. Except that it looks like it actually did happen in Texas, back around # 175 of the current Perry record-breaking onslaught of official blood-letting, when--relying on over-zealous prosecution, and flawed forensics, a Texas jury convicted, and sentenced to death, and The State of Texas executed a man named Cameron Todd Willingham for committing an arson that killed his children. One of "us"...It happens so infrequently that it's memorable. Besides, Justice Antonin "Vafanculo; the Big Canoli" Scalia says if procedures have been properly followed, actual innocence is no bar to execution. No. really...

I've seen posts on Fbook today villifying St. Barry for not intervening in the matter but that's specious, and dishonest.

Because Obombster can command drone raids does not mean he can order Georgia to release a prisoner. He can order YOU shot on sight, if he deems you a threat to the Security of the State. But he has no authority to intervene if Georgia wants to commit capital punishment in the name of its citizens.

Those two things are not in the same universes of discourse.

He's culpable enough for the sins of commission and omission in the normal run of things. No need to blame him for that for about which he REALLY can do nothing.

Anyway, that's how it crumbled for Troy Davis yesterday.

Now don't forget to go by the store and pcik up some WorldWide Hippies stuff. Too kewl ampules, t-shirts and bumperstickers. So I'll know ya when I see ya at the Beach, hippies!

WWH/ATCC (9/21/11): "Ray-All Poh-lit-TEEK!"

2011-09-21T06:44:00.000-07:00

Good Morrow, Hippies. Howzzit going this week so far. Peace!

The cookie today is pronounced "Real-Politik." The confection'll have a many-layered, Middle Eastern flavor to it.

Palestine at this moment is nothing less than a political petry dish for "post-modern" colonialism. Israel it seems will never cease to try to expel Arabs from what it deems its "natural' territorial sphere. Assimilation seems a dubious proposition at best. Arabs, for their part, probably will NEVER cease to resent and resist.

Palestinian Arab leader Mahmoud Abbas reiterated Monday that they will try this Friday to win a vote in the UN for "Statehood." If successful--which the US and the ISraelis will move heaven and earth to prevent--Palestinian statehood would be a real game-changer.

It is NOT a 'religious' issue. It's about the land, and the resources...(see map, attached)...The same tensions, and hostilities, and the same stratagems for contesting them, would be used by any two groups in a similar conflict. Anywhere, anytime.

It may be a small irony that it is in fact immaterial that this situation pits "Jews" against their 'semitic' cousins who shifted their spiritual allegiance from Yhwh to Allah, some 1500 years ago. That's just an excuse, masking--in the real politik sense--comprehensible, territorial ambitions: namely to consolidate all the land between the Jordan and the Sea, between Lebanon and Suez under Israeli hegemonic control.

The State of Israel, by any 'rational' (real-Politik) standard (and by long-understood definitions of 'Sovereignty', cannot countenance the existence of a separate, sovereign State within its borders. That would be anathema to ANY state. So Israel is extremely unlikely to enter--willingly--into any agreement which provides for anything like a co-equal Arab state in Palestine. The US wouldn't let the Navajo have their own Air Force, "sovereign" though the tribe might be, in law. Hell, we barely let 'em have their own police.

The real rub is that the Israelis would actually have to negotiate--BINDING, and IN GOOD FAITH, cuz that's how States negotiate with each other. Absent Palestinian statehood,' the Israelis could do, and pretty much have done, pretty much anything they would. As a "State', the Palestinians would have the standing to DEMAND to be treated as equals. I don't think "real-politik" Israel, as a State, can tolerate that.

On the more applied, local level, there is absolutely NO WAY that any Israeli politician could face the Israeli electorate having handed back to a Palestinian State water which the kibbutzim needed to 'make the desert bloom.' Can you see Bibi Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman telling a bunch of settlers to pull back from an Arab village they covet? Or explaining to a bunch of kibbutzim why they have to share precious water with the people commonly referred to as "filthy Arabs?"

Me neither....So that's the dilemma.

Obama is just the latest Murkin Prez to ignore or miss or misunderestimate Israeli "real-Politik."

In a way analogous way Upton Sinclair's cynical declaration that "It is hard to get a man to see what his job depends on him ignoring," neither Obama nor any other US leader "can" see-can't acknowledge--that Israel has those territorial ambitions. Still, they are undeniable. Netanyahu advisor and former Israeli Cabinet member Dori Gold has said repeatedly that settlements must continue to provide "a future" for some "300,000 settlers." That is about as clear a statement of "manifest destiny' as you'd ever want to hear, outside the 19th Century USofA..

In 'reality,' there is no way Israel, the State, can tolerate any arrangement for the Palestinians in Israel which is NOT basically an apartheid-like assortment of bantustans such as those the white South Africans set up for their pesky blacks; or, at best, reservations like those on which USers isolate and disempower those from whom WE stole "our" country.

Real Politik: It just means "How things really are, shorn of spin and pretense." Kinda like how the cookie crumbles, hippies...

PS: (and way off topic) I'll start to believe Corporations are people only when Rick Perry executes a couple of 'em.

Oh yeah, and go by the store and stock up on Worldwide Hippies paraphernalia, including bumper stickers, which we have aplenty. That way I'll know where you parked when I see you at the beach...

Hippie News & Stuff: Decline & Fall (WWH, 9/19/11)

2011-09-19T12:58:00.001-07:00

Absent the (somewhat too loud) background music, here's my Hippie News & Stuff commentary:

As The Cookie Crumbles (WWH, 9/17/11): "Dear Mister President..."

2011-09-16T06:32:00.000-07:00

Good morning, all Hippies and Freaks, at home and abroad and afloat...PEACE!

At the risk of appearing to unnecessarily flog an expired equine, this is a letter I'd send to the Obombster, if I thought it would matter:

Honored sir:

I take the liberty to speak to you, not as an equal, not as a postulant, not as a constituent but as an "elder." You're the same age as my little brother. Call it "Fraternal/avuncular council." I was born not far from where you lived in the near south-side of Chicago. Think of me as a "grey-beard from the hood," with some friendly advice.

I notice you are spending a big effort to drum up public interest in your so-called "jobs" program. The response has been lackluster, and perhaps you're wondering why? Lemme explain, if I may...

First, you must know, a LOT of people invested a LOT of HOPE in your promises of change--all that "Yes, We Can" folderoll. I wasn't among 'em. The last time I was disappointed in a public figure was when the tooth-fairy only left me a dime for a molar.

But for those who did, their sense of loss is still palpable. It has come to seem, I think, that every time they invested talent, money and energy in what they thought was your agenda, it's seemed to them that you sold 'em short.

For the obvious example, their kids are still dying in unnecessary, immoral, and unjust wars, many having succumbed to a "poverty draft." Yeah, they're volunteers. But you said you'd bring them home. Summer, 2011? Remember? They do.

Our/their health care still reeks of the effluent of corpoRat influence and favor. You once proposed what sounded to many, if not most, of them like a single payer plan. Then you announced you'd settle for much less, and got even less than that. It no longer seems we await "When" the promised features will ensue, but "IF", they can proceed in the teeth of concerted GOP efforts to thwart even that little progress.

And it sure seems that we're investing more in rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan than in our own infrastructure. Of course, you have full discretionary authority over DoD funds. Should we declare war on ourselves and lose?

You said we’d be working on green energy projects, but "we" aren’t. It's all still the old unholy trinity: Nukes, coal, and oil. You fired the only Green guy who could have given your efforts any cred. Are you waiting for the definitive proof?

You've apparently already agreed to sign a bill to put an oil pipeline across our country border to border. Over 100 MILLION gallons of crude and distillate petroleum has spilled from domestic pipelines since 1999. It doesn't take much of that stuff in the water or on the ground to really screw stuff up for MILES around. They had an experience like that along the Yellowstone River recently, and one in Michigan, too.

Some folks even recall--with some impatience, really--that you indicated we’d get some of our freedoms back with you in the WhioteHouse. Imagine their surprise when you not only didn't even throw in a "pro forma" hesitation before renewing the Patriot Act, TWICE...but then even strengthened it the last time, too. Coulda knocked them civil liberties folks down with a feather, when you backed away from Habeas corpus.

You did say people who committed war crimes should be brought to justice, but then effectively trivialized their offenses. And then you seem to have discovered ways even to surpass the Busheviks in blood-thirsty enterprise. How many innocents have the drones killed in the AfPak? Have we lost count? Under Bush, they DIDN'T count dead Iraqis--didn't wanna "body count mentality, or something--so if you're counting--even if we lost coutn--its progress I guess.

If I'm any judge, your supporters were willing to fight for what they THOUGHT they heard you saying. Hell, at one time you might have even turned my head. But when crunch time came, you ALWAYS “compromised.” I say “compromised” but that's being kind. They were give-aways, plain and simple.

And it appears you're still "compromising" our "entitlements": Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and the rest of the safety net. Nobody knows what's on the table or off it.

So why should someone invest energy in your already patently inadequate, and probably doomed jobs program, when we all can predict what yet another “compromise” will inevitably ensue? What will you fight for? A good deal for the Bosses, and bollocks for the rest of us.

Still, you're right in thinking most of those who supported you last time probably couldn’t vote for Perry, Romney, Paul, or any of the GOPuke Clown-Car Candidates.

But, come next November, they might just fire a "compromise" of their own back at ya, and either stay home or "waste" a ballot. Again, don't worry about them. There PLENTY of unemployed, underemployed, disabled, uninsured wannabe “Republicans” who are simply not bright enough to vote in their own best interest who’d cancel out that vote anyway.

I don't wanna beat a dead horse, but if the shoe fits, Dobbin, you mighta throwed it yourself.

PS: Waddaya call horses in adjoining stalls?
Neighhhhhh-bors...
Have a great Saturday, hippies...

As The Cookie Crumbles (WWH, 9/16/11): Blow Jobs.

2011-09-16T06:21:00.000-07:00

Good mornin', good hippie folks, and all the Whos on Whoville

Poverty in the USofA = $22,113 for family of four. Forty-six million two hundred thousand Americans--are poor even by our own niggardly standards. That's 2.6 million more than two years ago. There are 16.4 million children living in poverty in this country. I tried to remember today when the last time I'd heard ThePrez utter the word, and couldn't.

Unemployment is epidemic. There are more than SIX unemployed workers for EVERY job opening. FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE applied at last summer's MCDonald's "jobs fair." They hired at about the same rate that Harvard accepted incoming freshmen: around 6 percent. And there hasn't been anything like this degree of wealth inequality since the Gilded Age.

Like most statistics, I suppose these numbers only really matter if you are one of those enumerated. A piece on Alternet the other day (linked in the accompanying text) highlights the problems with reporting such information along with the inadequacy of the framing of standard replies:

‎"The real numbers—like that the wealthiest 300,000 Americans received as much income as the bottom 150 million—sound too crazy to be true. As a result, proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy are so often dismissed as wild-eyed populist rhetoric—“soaking the rich”—rather than legitimate, reasonable policy prescriptions."

As usual, after a clear enunciation of the problem, the solution proposed by the author is: "YOU have to stop them":

"(Though they) would have you believe the (mal) distribution of wealth is a naturally occurring phenomenon, state investment and regulation plays an essential role in the structure of the economy. If we want a more equal playing field, we can have it—but we need to start now."

But of course, that's just the point: Start WHERE? These are federal tax laws "we" have to change. There is ONLY ONE way to ensure a more level playing field, and that is through legislation designed and intended to LEVEL that field; legislation to UNDO all the special favors, tax breaks, considerations, and deals that Gummint makes to ensure a "favorable business climate."

Understandably, the people who benefit MOST from the current inequities obviously do NOT have any desire to LOSE their advantages, and they OWN the process--BOTH so-called "parties," every voting machine, every candidate, every medium--by which any such changes would have to be implemented: the legislatures and legislators, and the regulators, along with the CorpoRat/SCUM "Press." So they've "fixed" things in their favor.

But the smelly throngs will clamor, so the other night the Prez belatedly but enthusiastically began flogging his new "jobs" act. Rotsa Ruck, sez I! Even if it passes, its immediate 'benefits' to workers in the form of tax reductions, will be deducted from their long-term well-being in the form of a damaged, reduced, perennially embattled Social Security fund. It's more of the WRONG solutions, and in any case, too-little-too-late, again.

So to me the recommendations of the Alternet writer have the quality of incantations against looming spirits. If you think St. Barry's got the stones (to say NOTHING of the desire) to face down THAT much concentrated wealth and power, I got a couple of LOVELY skyscrapers--a LITTLE damaged--in Lower Manhattan I'd love to show ya...

Til then, ask not for whom the cookie crumbles, hippies. It tolls for thee...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As the Cookie Crumbles (9/13/11): THAT'S THE POINT!

2011-09-13T12:12:00.000-07:00

Hey Hippies, Hipsters, Yippies, and the rest of the scattered bretheren: Peace!

You know, my ph.d.'s in education, so I gravitate back to this subject occasionally, and that's the "flavor" so to speak, of our cookie today.

The etymological root of the word "teach" harkens back to that most powerful gesture of which people are capable: To POINT. It was first used in that context back in the ancient Indo-European language root on the prairies of Central Asia, the trans-caucasus back in the mists of memory.

From there, as a gutteral, glottal monosylable, probably, it migrated west into the Germanic languages, and south, through India, into Greece, where it morphed into "deixis."

There is a class of adjective/pronoun in English grammar called "deictic": "the," "there," "this," "that," "these," "those," "they" and "them" exhaust the class; each of them acts to point to a particular thing). But that's beside the point...

Which is that, "teaching" is nothing more or less than directing attention in some way, either by word or action toward an important, impingent phenomenon: "Look." or "LOOK OUT!"

So, in practice, anyone who "sees" and is aware of their surroundings, enough to pick out anomalies, exceptions, etc, may be--since we're all in this together, probably SHOULD be-- a "teacher." Teaching, then, is pointing to facts in such a way as to invite others to see, and to understand, too.

Everyone can teach something, but a "teacher" has a wider ambit. Their view is larger, wider, better informed.

"Learning" is what happens later when we reflect upon and discuss WHAT we have observed.

So, if you look around for something that the test-happy, factoid-based, corpoRat-sponsored curriculum of the USer schools actually points students toward, the real purpose of schooling in the COrpoRat USofA appears to be, to induct 'graduates' seamlessly (and seemlessly) to the consumer curriculum of the CorpoRat/State media for the rest of their lives.

Pedagogy's an interesting word, too. We use it to mean the art of teaching, and you can trace the metaphorical connection easily enough to yher root, which was a labelk attached to the slaves whose jobs it was to lead the Masters' children to and from the Academies.

We see in the continuous and baleful attacks on teachers, especially, among public servants, how that pernicious aura of presumptive servitude regarding teachers' status persists even into today.

And that's how that cookie crumbles, hippies...

PS: Stop by the Store on yer way out and check out the shirts (tees and tanks), those kewl amulets, and stock up on bumperstickers. There'll be more cool stuff in there pretty soon, too.

WWH/HN&S (9/12/11): Forget It...

2011-09-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

Thanks Winston, ...Yo, Bugs, Glad you asked...

I dunno about all y'all, but I did my level BEST to ignore all the memorial hoopla, and the attendant predictable maelstrom of prefabricated jingoistic fury. I really did. But you couldn't change channels fast enough: out of NOWHERE, BAM! there it was.

It's like picking at a scab, or unhealed stitches.

If, by endlessly probing 'the wound,' we were 'draining the poison,' or resetting the break, it might be different.
If it stirred us to examine what WE--the USofA-- had done to bring on such an attack, it might be different.
If we took from it the obvious lessons about neo-colonialism, and neo-liberal, imperialistic over-reach, we might be forgiven these bathetic forays into national masochism.

Any public "anniversary," whatever the number or event commemorated, is a pseudo-event, an exercise in propaganda existing only to provide media with more fodder. If you did watch, didja count the commercials???

The Owners can and will continue to play this like "A Wonderful Life," or a lost Elvis concert...year after yer after year after year...

Meanwhile "WE," US, the USofA, unrepentant, continue on the same bloody, Imperialistic path that brought us here in the first place.

Remind me again: Why are "WE" bombing the shit out of brown people on the whole OTHER side of the world, who haven't done any harm us, and had NOTHING to do with the offense for which we are allegedly still 'punishing? them'

For perspective: Proportionally, there are MANY more Panamanians whose relatives and/or loved ones were killed by the USer invasion to overthrow Noriega than there are Americans who suffered such loss on 9/11/01.

AND more than a MILLION Iraqis have died DIRECTLY in consequence of the illegal, unjust, unjustified, unjustifiable, immoral, criminal, murderous USer invasion of their country.

That's between 4 and 5 percent of the population killed. In a country which had nothing AT ALL to do with the "attack" that was framed as the "casus belli..." To kill that proportion among US, it would mean more than 15 MILLION dead.

There is a class of epistemic events properly named "BULL_SHIT" and this is a prime example. I had to turn my back on all the creepy, pious, solemn, empty moralizing and sermonizing, all that it accompanied (and implied)! No mas!

The whole repetitive spectacle--from the 'memorial plaza' and the construction thereof, to the endless repetitions of the tragic footage, to the ceremonies marking the remembrances of the perished; and I grieve for them, too--to me positively REEKED of banal, mawkish, maudlin self-absorption...

At which, it must be said, we "Murkins" probably ARE STILL Number One!

Thanks for your attention, Hippies. See ya at the beach... and back to you, in Hippie Central, Winston...

WWH/ATCC (9/10/11)(w/vid): An "Ap-Paul-ing" Dream

2011-09-10T06:14:00.001-07:00

Greetings Earthlings! and a glad "Klaatu barata nicto" all around, eh!

A correspondent in the UK asked me in all sincerity why, when there were 1) so many other, bigger targets around, and 2) so many other PROBLEMS than identifying the presumptive GOPhux Presidential candidate, did I focus my attention and bile on Ron Paul. I blame it on the American Dream: anyone can grow up to be President.

Of the whole, sorry lot of them--give the devil his due--Ron Paul probably is the only one with anything even approaching the necessary...ummm... "gravitus." He's the one who takes himself the most seriously, the one with the most pronounced faux-intellectual pretensions (and credentials), the most unctuously, righteously smarmy of them, with his blithely Ann-Randian --which is to say, predatory--'Libertarianism' camouflaging his abject obeisance to his CorpoRat masters.

And he's the one who seems to have the most appeal to disaffected "lefties," for some reason; mostly because of his "stands" on ending the USer wars both in Central Asia, and against marijuana.

However "ap-Pauling" he may appear from afar, if you're not an American, it is more difficult to realize that there is, in principle or practice, really NOTHING to prevent Ron Paul from being 'elected' President.

Ya gotta remember, in 2008, we 'elected' an unproven, untried, greenhorn, first-term, corn-state, mixed-race, rookie Senator with ambiguous political credentials, mainly on "appearances": he 1) was not a white Republican, and he 2) was expertly marketed in a campaign that led voters to believe that that, alone, would make a difference.

Before THAT, we TWICE elected a jovial, dim-witted, seemingly ILLITERATE, compliant sock-puppet and his psychopathic puppeteer to smilingly lead the country into wrack and ruin. They committed war crimes, robbed the treasury for their bankster buddies, flat-out STOLE two elections, engineered TWO "wars-of-choice," and when they were at last replaced, it was NOT to answer warrants and indictments, but to MILLION-DOLLAR book deals and speaking tours.

Then there was that luminously stupid, second-rate actor who started it all with his eight-year descent into gibbering idiocy during the 80s, whilst his thugs and gunsels set things up for the long term take-over.

It's the "American Dream" and it is truly terrifying, if you think about it:

Any-fucking-body CAN be "President."

So bully-ragging on Ron Paul is at least no less productive than heaping mockery, scorn and derision on any of the rest of the GOPhux Clown Car Candidates, and it may dissuade the unwary from undue admiration.

Which, finally, is all one really CAN do, unless it is--as HL Mencken once remarked, that any rational person must sometimes be tempted--"to spit on our hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats." Ap-Paul-ing, innit?

Anyway that's how the cookie crumbles, today, chillun...See ya at the beach, hippies.

WWH~~ As The Cookie Crumbles (9/9/11): Resentment

2011-09-09T03:31:00.000-07:00

To all the ships at sea, and to Hippies in their happy hippievilles everywhere!!!
GOOD MORNIN'!

As the cookie crumbles today, with the apparent defection of Cornell West and Tavis Smiley, a breech seems to have developed in the Obamster's Black base, as on one hand, less informed and/or less engaged voters increasingly become disappointed that, Obama hasn't "done" anything especially or recognizably "for" the Black community; meanwhile the intelligentsia notice that "ThePrez" is pursuing policies which are NOT really even very much those of a "Democrat," much less of a "Black" Democrat in the WhiteHouse...

It is probably an unfortunate, uncomfortable fact that just about the ONLY way in which Obamster's 'election' actually ever "mattered" was "symbolically." As a practical matter, there was NEVER a moment when he would have been able to redress specific problems within "minority" communities as their advocates. No, really.

Even under the most benign circumstances (which these weren't), he'd nevertheless have been effectively forbidden by the quite real fear of a backlash from authoring or authorizing ANY measures which could be perceived to grant "privileges" to "his people." He had--understandably, or not--no taste for being called out by Rush and the Ditto-heads for "favoring HIS people" against "the rest of America..." Which is what the charge would have been.

That's actually why "Obama-care" got the reception it did, from the Tea-hadists.

Them folks operate on a very high level of resentment at the "loss" of their (previously socially endorsed) "superiority" over those they regard as their racial "inferiors," such that they are apparently willing to endure a minor loss to their own over-all well-being, as long as by doing so, they can deprive those whom they detest of ANY of part of it at all...

It is for this reason that the brigades of Hover-round harriers are willing to see Medicare crash, and Obama-care fail, even if both would be detrimental to their overall well-being:

I think it is because there is an "unacceptable" amount of egalitarianism embedded in universal health care, for instance, by virtue of which EVERYBODY gets treated the same way. The rabid tea-hadist sensibility resists being in even the same system with "those" people. I believe they think themselves diminished by having to accept the same care from the same providers in the same facilities as those whom the do NOT regard as their equals...

Yeah, it's pretty stupid.

And that the way the cookie crumbles, hippies...See ya at the beach!

WWH/As The Cookie Crumbles (9/6/11): Thanks

2011-09-06T10:22:00.000-07:00

To all the Whos in Whoville, and all the Hippies in Hippievilles everywhere: Good Morning!

Sunday on The Book, another piece of Obama-fondling fodder made the rounds, this off Kos; like all others of that ilk, its author called out to the critical outliers of the 'professional left' who persist in ATTACKING their St. Barry from within, so to speak, to just STOP acting so durn SILLY, and bask in the panoply of wonders St. Barry Obama's DONE for you! In helpful categories. With hot-links and everything!

At the same time, folks were reacting pretty critically in my little corners of the universe to the news that, on Friday, the slowest news day of the year, ThePrez ordered the EPA to stop implementation of stricter air-quality regs for energy producers.

To me, that flagrant appeal for approval sounded like WE'RE supposed to be grateful HE'S doing just SOME of his job. It's not what bills he's signed that matters. That's only what the people who 'elected' him were entitled to expect.... A minimum...the LEAST he could do.

What matters, to me, anyway, is what he HASN'T done. It's the opposition he SHOULD have mounted, and didn't, or feigned and walked back from, as on the air quality regs, on Friday. (I've catalogued some items in the text below. Feel free to add your own.)

Now, purportedly, no small part of his "jobs" program will consist in things for which he does NOT require Congressional approval. (It goes to the People, on Sept 8-12, depending on the swell...)That was the brag last week, anyway. But that just leaves me breathless. What the FUCK! I mean, what the fuck, man...

I MEAN:
IF these soon-to-be-announced expedients don't require Congressional approval NOW, I'm betting dollars to quatloos that they didn't require such approval, oh, say, LAST YEAR at this time, when as I recall, there was already a serious recession going on?

In fact, there was NOTHING to have prevented him implementing them in his first week of his tenure, was there? Naaah, he just didn't. This is Obomberama Puro!

Or how about a directive to ALL federally owned or managed buildings to simply paint their roofs white? It's not crazy. Here's a link. And here's a link for the "Precautionary Principle," too, while you're at it.

Such complaints may sound trivial, but to me it's emblematic of the things he COULD and SHOULD do, but avoids and/or ignores. It's "significant." I'm a semiotics guy. Signs matter. Those are signs, and not even particularly complicated ones.

So give me a farking BREAK with all the grateful encomiums. YER getting dicked-over, and you're THANKING him, lavishly, begging for MORE?
Please.
I understand you may feel you HAVE to vote for him.
At least have the decency to do so with regret.

And that's the way this cookie crumbles...have a day, hippies!

Note: We're all adults here. Adults don't get, or expect, praise for doing the right thing--or for NOT doing the wrong one. It's how it is.
The catalogue"

It's the WARS that he DIDN'T end (plus the new ones he approved).
And the CIA drones slaughtering people wholesale in Asia.
And the Super (Cat-Food) Commission.
And don't EVEN talk to me about "regulating the Banksters." That was Chris Dodd's retirement package.
His education "policy" --indeed his whole Cabinet-ful of Dis-Appointments-- is a sell-out to the globalist CorpoRats.

Feel free to add your own.

HN&S, 9/5/11: Matter

2011-09-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

....Thanks Winston, and Aloha, grommets, from the sunny beaches of Albuquerque, NM...

Lotta folks have noticed the two-party system has some drawbacks.

What the two-party system guarantees is that EVERY election will be an exercise in denial, of rejection; of a populace, agrieved, shouting "NO! AWAY WITH YOU! You sodding awful charlatans, NO MORE!" And they vote to throw the bastids out, not caring over much in the heat of their disapproval about what is going to take their places, or of what depravities THE REPLACEMENTS could be capable.

I agree with those who believe that with McCain in the WhiteHouse, we’d never've heard a PEEP about cutting Social Security, or otherwise screwing with the safety-net, such as it is.

The GREEDY, OLEAGINOUS PERVERTS (the GOP) with the Chimperor at their head, tried that in ’04-05, after a SUCCESSFUL election season, and were still roundly beaten back by Dim MINORITIES in both Houses -- and by a massive PUBLIC outcry and resistance.

I've thought and said all along the GOP THREW the ’08 election. It was dead obvious when Palin went on the ticket. They were goin' under the bus...Which was tough on John McCain. "Bombin' Johnny," the jet pilot, was always a fusty ol' fart, but he's really got stupid mean since 2008. He DESPERATELY WANTED to be President, and surpass his father's military accomplishments: President outranks Admiral.

As to the coming election, I think The GOPhux probably throw this one, too. There is no candidate in their Clown Car who is worth the effort and expense of stealing it for.

BUT: In Twenty-Sixteen, with the blame for all the troubles of the previous (by then) FORTY years, including the FIRST REALLY OBVIOUS EVIDENCE OF THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE, once and for all firmly affixed to the shoulders of America’s “first Black” president and his “party” of "the Losers," the GOP'll swoop back in with Bush/Cheney, redivivus!

JEB Bush and LIZ Cheney: Slogan "Bush/Cheney -- Together AGAIN!" Now THAT could revive irony.

It's all about what Gregory Bateson called "differences that make a difference." The thing to remember is Obama was ‘elected’ principally because he was NOT a "white, male Republican,” and because of a genius "branding" campaign that skillfully made it SEEM that THAT actually mattered.

(Freudian Aside: Do ALL these people have "father" issues? O's a fatherless child, W was either 1) avenging or 2) out-doing his father (or BOTH)...The Clenis was fatherless, too. McCain's father was a highly decorated Admiral ( an Arabic word, fyi ). GHWBush's daddy was a Nazi. The fruit falleth not far from the tree, and all that? It might be a useful thing to do to examine candidates for president in light of their relations with their parents. Just sayin.)

As The Cookie Crumbles (Vid): Trials

2011-09-05T12:34:00.001-07:00

Good MORNING! Fellow Cookie Crumblers!

Of ALL the questions that dog "ThePrez," almost three years into his tenure, nne of the most persistent and vexing is this:

"WHY DIDN'T St. Barry prosecute bloody-handed, murderous, immoral miscreant/agents of the Bushevik regime for their freely admitted mal-and misfeasances in office?"

Many are perplexed by the seeming paradox of the Chimperor Bush and his organ-grinder pal, Dick Cheney, (among scores of OTHER malefactors from that regime) who are currently BOTH...NOT IN JAIL, And bragging in books and lectures of their criminal misdeeds, without any apparent fear of legal consequences.

Why DO these often admitted CRIMES go unrebuked and unpunished...

Good question! I am not a lawyer, but I can think of at least FOUR plausible--though far from compelling--reasons.

1) No precedent--Nobody'd ever done it before: Not what Bush had done, not what Obama was being ASKED to do. You have no idea how daunting that fact is.

...There were NO rules, no governing authorities, no laws, nothing.

Anmd then, of what would they be accused?

And what would be the implictions of such accusations, anyway?

That sort of thing makes lawyers, PARTICULARLY "Constitutional scholars," quite uneasy.

2) No "case"--Assuredly the defense would have argued as follows:

"Hey! There was a war going on! It was justified! The safety of the country was imperiled! There were terrorists in every airplane, train and bus. They were trying to DESTROY us. They hated us for our freedoms. It was an international jihad, with robed, fiercely mustachio'd, scimitar-wielding assassins at the very GATES of the city!

If the Busheviks pled "national emergency," they could've hidden the evidence and said they were acting in 'public interest'.

3) No "jury"--would convict 'em. Even getting past the defense arguments, remember more than 30% of people still approve what the GOPhux did. Thirty percent of a 12-person jury is 3.6 people. Between one-in-three and one-in-four of potential jurors would ALREADY bve predisposed to acquit. You only need ONE to nullify; and

4) No gutz: If he'd gone after them, the GOP'd have lynched Obummer after his term, whenEVER it ended. St. Barry's a pragmatist. He knows, as well as anybody else, that every President since Roosevelt has been the author of 'war-crimes.' Hell, the Ecru Crusader's ALREADY committed every crime Bush did, and then some, in AfPak, with his drones. The first HINT that St. Barry was aiming to bring the Busheviks to the bar of justice, the GOPhux long knives would have come out--as they may, in any case, regardless...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Head Hippie has decided to postpone the Hippie News and Stuff til TUESDAY, to take his own leisure from the labors of assembling and editing and posting the program. BE SURE to tune in TUESDAY, around 4pm EDT, for the next Edition of "Hippie News and Stuff..."

Til then, see ya at the BEACH, hippies...

A

As The Cookie Crumbles: Two Guns

2011-09-02T06:08:00.001-07:00

(WWH, 9/2/11) Two gun-related stories from "fact-checking" sources on Thursday morning's F-book inspired me to engage in a bit of practical propaganda. I want to start a slanderous rumor!

First, there was the story from Arizona that the GOPhux in Pima County, AZ, home of the nearly assassinated Rep, Gabby Giffords, were auctioning off a Glock handgun to raise money for the coming campaigns.

This was followed, in short order, by a report from a local scion of Politifact that the GOPhux in Oregon were auctioning off an AR-15 combat-style assault rifle to help finance their forthcoming campaigns. (In this, in Oregon, the GOPhux are not alone: the state office of some NRA spin-off is raffling off FIVE of the things.)

The Politifact piece deemed the charges "Mostly True." What the fuck? Did the GOPhux just auction off the ammo and a couple of banana-clips, I wondered? How is something like that "Mostly True?" Did money change hands? Did the weapon?

Yes, and yes, to both questions.

Turns out the Politifact folks quibbled over the term "assault rifle." Technically," an "assault" rifle must be capable of full-on, rock'n'roll, auto--blazing--matic--and not merely one-shot-at-a-time, semi-automatic--firing. (Confession: Full-on, rock'n'roll, 3-5-second-burst auto IS a gas.)

But that was just the summary of my vexation. It began with the "Glock piece" in Arizona, and the utter contempt it mirrored. It seemed to me to be callousness of the most troglodytic, male-patriarchal, repressive, regressive, passive/aggressive ASSWHOLE kind.

To reflect that contempt, and to satirize it, I commented, in essence:

"I heard the GOPhux Party of Pima County, AZ, is auctioning off Jarred Loughner's Glock in Gifford's district in AZ.

Gettin' the boy a furlough from jail to pull the lucky number, too."

It was patently not true, of course. Were the GOPhux of Pima County actually humans, they might have accused me of slander. Then a reader corrected me, taking at face value my intentional mistake of naming the weapon to be Loughner's, which it almost certainly COULDN'T be, it now reposing, empty and harmless (or so one hopes) in the evidence locker of some AZ DA.

And in the reminder from that reader, I caught a glimpse of something useful: that's how propaganda works. It is utterly immaterial whether it contains a grain of, or the whole, truth. It plants the idea. And then, behind the surge of familiarity that follows the employment of the "Big Lie" strategy, the idea soon BECOMES truth by virtue of endless reiteration.

So I am repeating it.

"I heard the GOPhux Party of Pima County, AZ, is auctioning off Jarred Loughner's Glock in Gifford's district in AZ.
Gettin' the boy a furlough from jail to pull the lucky number, too."

Help me make it viral. I would fucking LOVE to watch that meme take off...

*Top Image: Field-stripped, AR-15 "Hello-kitty."
**Next Image: Really! You don't wanna know...

As The Cookie Crumbles: One Swing

2011-09-01T04:55:00.000-07:00

As the season creeps into autumn, again, I was both surprised and delighted that "Labor Day," our ONLY national nod to "working people," was still on the calendar.

This long decade, now, I have harbored the wary suspicion that there would arise a movement to turn the end-of-summer holiday into some annual display of faux-patriotic, maudlin, bathetic banality, and supplant "Labor Day" with the exceptionalist equivalent of "9/11 Martyrs' Day." It could still happen, but I especially dreaded the up-welling of lugubrious patriotism and other mawkish remembrances of the the forth-coming Tenth Anniversary, and we seem to have dodged THAT bullet, at least.

Workers in MOST of the REST of the world enjoy to a far greater extent than ANY American "workers" things like universal, virtually free health care--and all that it entails, including long-term stipends when injury prevents work--plus alternative energy sources, good, safe, reliable transport services, and better working conditions than do MOST Murkins. But given what services they enjoy for the taxes they pay, far fewer of them complain nearly as much or as loudly or as venomously about it as do Murkins.

Speaking of frames: Why is taxation a "burden?" To me, taxes are "dues," friends. You pay your dues. Or think of it like the Association fees at the biggest condo in the world: Keeps the lawns mowed, and the wrought iron painted, and the streets swept clean. The management company might suck porta-potties through a flavo-straw, but that doesn't invalidate the duty to contribute.

That 'duty' is what Locke, Rousseau, and them other enlightenment fellers--including, as a matter of fact, most of our Founders--were talking about, with the "social contract." Ya can't "reify" it, but it exists, still, like the tacit agreements we all inhabit, about language and custom. It is negotiable, in what MLK optimistically called the "long arc of justice."

A useful example is labor rights. The Labor movement all over the world fought throughout the 19th and the first 50 years into the 20th Centuries to achieve the position that, in labor-management relations, there was a PRESUMPTION of the workers' right to collective bargaining.

Largely un/under-reported in the country's "popular" history is the fact that, over those 150 years, some uncounted dozens of thousands of ordinary workers, laborers, and 'hands, perished under the tender mercies of the gunsels and thugs employed by the Owners to prevent the workers' organizing. Countless thousands more were injured in confrontations, all over the country, between workers and Rangers, state militias, Pinkertons, the National Guard and even the Army.

And not workers alone were murdered and injured. Their families, too, suffered death and grievous hurt, at the hands of the hired criminals in the Owners' employ. Vide, Ludlow, Colorado, 1914.

So, now that the Owners are actively discarding those hard-won and deadly-fought advances in workers' rights, reversing the arc of justice of 150 years and innumerable bodies, why would it be exceptional to exact BACK from the Owners some of the same price that workers paid to win their rights in the first place?

But I could compromise. I'm a reasonable fellow. All I REALLY want is one swing: with an open hand, or a closed fist, or a sock-full of quarters: just one swing, to wipe that fucking smirk off their sneering fucking gobs.

As the Cookie Crumbles (WWH, 8/30/11): Intelligence

2011-08-30T13:42:00.001-07:00

(WWH, 8/30/11) The (current--these things can change so fast) Arch-Dickwad of the Dominionist, tea-bagging, neo-Fascist, raving Rightoids, Rick Perry was running his feculent gob at a recent speech to supporters at a meeting of the Houston Chamber of Commerce. In it he betrayed both his own fractured, almost comical misunderstandings of the purpose of BOTH education and schooling, as well as the deep animus he and his sympathizers cherish against an "educated" electorate. (Frankly, they needn't worry over much, but that's another story.)

The report of Perry's ramblings reveals a lot about the "epistemic" assumptions that Perry and his imbecilic ilk hold on matteres such as the need and purpose of schooling, who should have it, and what its ends ought to be. I have no compunctions about telling you that 1) he's wholly and entirely WRONG and 2) to read the article. My intention here is simply to use Perry's words and positions as a platform for a somewhat different discussion, about a deeper issue: What it "Intelligence?"

Lots of people, for example, remarked upon George W. ("The Chimperor") Bush's many apparent cognitive and interpretive lapses. But, according to those who have known him, he is a genius at getting people to like him. From the perspective of masstering things that make easier the passage of your life, that's a very GOOD way of getting through the world. It's "smart," where "smart means "to find an advantage and use it."

We all come equipped, at birth, with a whole array of potential ways of being "smart." They were once regarded as "talents." MIT psychology Prof. Howard Gardner's theory of "multiple intelligences." Gardner's central insight (going on 30 years go) is that what used to be called "talents" are in fact separate, unique, distinguishable forms or modalities of a general competence that is summed up as "intelligences." By which I take him to mean that "intelligence" is the application of our different adaptive application of what our "intelligences" bring to the problems we encounter, the way we MAKE "ways of making sense of the world."

In the heyday of the psychometric and behaviorist eras, it was generally believed that intelligence was a single entity that was inherited; and that human beings - initially a blank slate - could be trained to learn anything, provided that it was presented in an appropriate way. Nowadays an increasing number of researchers believe precisely the opposite; that there exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early 'naive' theories of that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains. (Gardner 1993: xxiii)

Intelligence is not a "number." It is an array of talents and skills which enable people to navigate and negotiate their unique life-worlds. For Gardner, there were/are several (8, now) discernible modalities of experience, of which ALL of us possess ALL, though in different proportions. I'm a word person. My brother is a musician. My sister is a painter. Others are athletes, or aesthetes, or entertainers. My grandfather was a math guy. Not everyone excels ate every thing, but we ALL excel at one or another. The point, he argues, is that are at least EIGHT of them, and that all of us possess ALL of them, though in different proportions and to different degrees.

We're all good at sumpin...words (me), numbers, athletics/dance, music, sculpture/painting, contemplation, social manipulation, street-sense. Those are Howard Gardner's (still temporary) categories of the kinds of human intelligences there are. In principle there could WELL be others. But the implication--that we have vastly underestimated (even misunderestimated) the complexity of the issue--eludes the political peckerwoods like Rick Perry, who boot it around like the head of a fallen enemy.

Hippie News & Stuff: School Daze

2011-08-29T15:02:00.000-07:00

Hey, Hippies Like they say in the Islands, "SHAKA! Bra..."

When I started my doctoral studies in education in the mid-'80s, I encountered a LOT of statistical information, and one datum in particular struck and stuck: More than 65% of variance in students' scores on standardized tests is accounted for, statistically, by only ONE variable--the Socio-Economic Status of the family. For most kids, "success" in school is more directly predicted by, and more closely correlated with, the family ZIP Code than any individual students' IQ scores. I do not believe things have changed so much, especially since the testing industry has so successfully colonized the classroom--a precursor, I believe, for the eventual (inside 15 years) privatization of ALL schooling.

Almost 40 years ago, Jonathan Kozol wrote that those who proclaim the USer schools to be failures do not really understand the purpose of schooling. Schools, Kozol said, are ferociously good at what they are designed to do which is (paraphrasing here): ensuring as far as possible that as few children as possible escape the socio-economic niches for which they were born. Another scholar of the period, Joel Spring, regarded schools as "sorting machines," which separated students into (life-long, nearly inviolable) tracks according to the students' potential usefulness to the elites.

From such perspectives, it is NOT a stretch to suggest that the purpose of schooling is to compile a retroactive record for the purpose, at least in no small part, of rationalizing and supporting decisions that were made about those students before they EVER crossed the school-house threshold.

On a related point: For many politicians, schooling FOR THE PURPOSE OF PRE-EMPLOYMENT TRAINING--which, despite noble rhetoric to the contrary,has been the operating raisson d'etre of the whole enterprise since Nixon--schooling FOR THE PURPOSE OF PRE-EMPLOYMENT TRAINING is going to become less and less relevant.

If there aren't any jobs, the argument will go, why do we need schools to train workers? CorpoRats are not EXPANDING their hiring universes. Automation is NOT going to be less ubiquitous. So the "public" school is probably going to become culturally expendable, an inefficiency which the CorpoRats no longer need support. And education will again revert to being a luxury and perquisite of the rich.

As The Cookie Crumbles (WWH, 8/27): Decoys

2011-08-28T05:56:00.001-07:00

(WWH, 8/27/11)President O'Bomber's proposed "payroll tax-cuts" for the poor are "Trojans" (no, not condoms, it's a classical reference). Trojans, like those beguiling messages on Facebook inviting you to see what the girls' father saw, or watch the spider inside someone's gut, but which disguise a virus or a cookie or some OTHER malign, parasitic device.

Here's how this trojan attack works: Under the INTENTIONALLY misleading rhetorical disguise of "relieving the crushing burden" and "putting more money back" in the hands of low-wage earners, by "reducing payroll" (NOT "income") taxes," Obummer is stealthily following his orders from the Oiligarchs to finish off the New Deal safety net by attacking this "entitlement" with the death of a HUNDRED million cuts, $16-20 dollars at a time, each week. Reducing the SS withholding from around 6% to around 4% is a significant reduction but a pitiful raise, considering what it's buying. And it is inflicted on EVERY paycheck.

So, despite what you may hear to the contrary, the "payroll" tax reductions--the so-called "tax holidays"--are actually a stealth attack on Social Security. That's because every dollar of FICA NOT collected weakens the whole system, by shortening its viable life-span. By reducing the amount going into the fund, he attacks and undercuts the long-term viability of the program.

Do NOT forget: The Sainted O'Bummer HIMSELF initiated this plan of attack back LAST year, when "negotiating" with the GOPhux on the bushevik tax cuts for the wealthy. He's now following up with a proposal that--if you're not paying attention, or are easily gulled--SEEMS to be pro-working people, but which in fact works to further impoverish and immiserate them (US!)...

Remember that George, "the Chimperor," Bush tried to do it, by privatizing the fund, in 2004/05, and failed. But Bush had the disadvantage of being a RICH WHITE FUCKER and the Dims fought it off, even with minorities in BOTH Houses. St. Barry's plan is much more audacious, if slower acting. But he's the ONLY one who could bring it off..

President O'Bomber came to the Office with the (tacit, but well-understood) brief from the folks whom George Carlin called "the Owners" that he should use his status and stature as "Murka's FIRST BLACK President" to accomplish things they--the Owners--had been trying unsuccessfully to accomplish for 50 years: namely, and finally, to kill off Social Security and the rest of the old New Deal safety net. He was the "chosen one," because--as they learned to their discomfiture since the '60s-- ONLY the "FIRST BLACK" president COULD carry it off.

Remember, hippies: The Social Security Trust Fund is the LARGEST pool of capital in the WORLD which is NOT dedicated to the enrichment of the oiligarchs, the OWNERS. And they want it...Ohhhhh, how they want it. Think "Precious." It looks from here like they're going to get it...

As The Cookie Crumbles: Free-Trade Blues

2011-08-25T15:34:00.001-07:00

(WWH, 8/25) One question I see a lot is why the industrial capitalists don't just step in, do their patriotic duty, and help out good ol' Uncle Sam, by recreating and refurbishing the American manufacturing infrastructure and putting Americans back to work.

In a word, it boils down to "free trade."

Since the '80s, 14 Free Trade Agreements have been ratified by Congress, including (SING) APTA, AFTA, SICA, CEFTA, COMESA, G-3, GAFTA, GCC, NAFTA, SAFTA, SADC, MERCOSUR, TPP, and a couple that don't have acronyms. There are 23 more proposed or in various stages of completion. Interestingly almost all of 'em are with entities which have LOWER wages than ours.

Now, what do all these things do?

What they DO is remove/reduce barriers to capital movement, while usually simultaneously preventing the movement of labor and the enforcement of labor laws or worker safety agreements. The CorpoRats love 'em. Remember Ross Perot, and the "giant sucking sound" he predicted (accurately, as it turned out) would follow the signing of NAFTA? How higher paid, more expensively benefitted, American manufacturing) jobs went south?

Free trade agreements are touted by Gummints as binding nations together in bonds of trade, and by the US especially as "the foremost tools for "opening up foreign markets for American products and investment." Foreign investment, you must remember, almost always means the creation somewhere else of modes of production already in place albeit more expensively at home and making the more expensive unprofitably redundant, and obsolete.

Hence, the "giant sucking sound."

In the deluge of "FTA-liberated" capital, and the subsequent "investment" in 'overseas facilities," the Master Class then sold off, moved, or tore down the Murkin industrial/manufacturing infrastructure--after having raped the land, and indentured the people.

They went on to greener, cheaper pastures, and they ain't coming back...At least not to the USofA as currently recognized, with labor laws, waste disposal regulations, water and air quality standards, safety rules, and even a few unions. Noooooo way.

To 'bring back the jobs," bring the industry back, we're going to have to 'agree' to austerity on a grand scale. (which is what they're trying to get us used to now.) "We'll" have to virtually enslave ourselves in perpetuity to the CorpoRat class... Agree to work for peanuts, in unsafe conditions, in toxic-waste spewing factories, dumping waste for convenience, wherever it strikes the industries as likely, environmental consequences be damned. We need jobs, they demand incentives.

What OTHER incentives can you offer them? Your daughters?

Cuz here's the dirty secret: The "world market" needs the USer consumer less and less. There are burgeoning populations of eager consumers with spending money in places like Brazil, China, Russia, and India who are desperate to "improve their lives" with the latest tchotchkes from GE (or GM), which produce them endlessly and more cheaply than ANY USer economy can or will. It's a seller's market, and we've been sold out.

As the Cookie Crumbles: Cat-Food

2011-08-23T05:27:00.000-07:00

The Catfood Commission! YES! It was, in fact, the 'defining moment," when he VOLUNTARILY accepted the GOPhux CorpoRat frame, when he accepted their "meme," conceded to THEIR logic and politics, refused to boldly assert one of his own in the arena where he SHOULD have been concentrating from the start (but didn't because--I think--he wanted to use his mandate to cement his legacy, with one big victory...which, sadly, wasn't).

No. Really! That was the last moment it was plausible to continue to believe him.

Mebbe you didn't get it when, during the campaign, O'Bombster allowed as how his model president was Reagan, and that he detested the 'excesses' of the '60s and '70--though you probably should have recalled that that epoch included the successful culmination of the civil rights era, and King's turn against colonialist wars.

Mebbe you didn't notice when the overwhelming majority of his "(Dis)appointments" were either carry-overs from the Bushevik era, or loyal shield-bearers for actively anti-democratic, corpoRat interests with globally hegemonic aspirations, and the willingness and apparently the power to invoke the "national" interest to their corpoRat battles.

I dunno how, but I suppose it's possible that you were in a combat-zone (not all that rare, these days) and did not witness the catastrophe that was his "negotiation" on reforming the health-care insurance industry, when before the opening press-releases hadn't even been traded, he collapsed on single-payer, and in short order gave away the public option and medicare-for-all on succeeding days, without the GOPhux having had so much as to breathe heavily?

And if you're enjoying flying remotely controlled, combat drones carrying both bombs and missiles, against essentially helpless people who may or may not be even alleged enemies, and watching from the on-board, real-time camera as the bodies fall--men, women, children, animals, it doesn't matter; or if you are making money off that enterprise in soome other way, as are STILL 10,000 private/corpoRat contractors in the Iraq/AfPak combat zone, this is a pretty good time: promotion on the horizon, or a new generation of drones, and operations along the US/Mexico border, in store. Future's so bright, ya gotta wear shades.

And then the Cat Food Commission. By then, it was (or should have been) impossible NOT to notice that O'Bummer's negotiating style was ALWAYS to assume a position of weakness and then give shit away, like he had no choice. HE put entitlements on the table, and HE did it in the discourse of "deficits" and "debt." If there's EVER been a clearer case of carrying the corpoRatists water, against the interests of the people, and their general well-being, I am not aware of it.

So you wouldn't have paid attention when, in caving in on the Bushevik tax cuts last year, he somehow neglected to wring even the faintest concession from the Owner's ass-clowns in the GOP on forthcoming budget and deficit arrangements. It wasn't like brain surgeons were needed to assess the situation. Some pimply reporter from a blog asked him about that at a press conference, and if even then the fucking light didn't go on, then probably...

you probably shouldn't be allowed to drive motorized vehicles, have matches, or breed.

No "Obama-hater" I, but a relentless critic of CorpoRatism, in any garb, pigmentation, or affiliation.

I have always opposed Obama, regarding him all along as what he has unmistakably demonstrated himself to have been: A malleable, plausible sockpuppet for Wall Street banksters, the USC0Commerce, and the globalist, CorpoRAT hegemons.

I object only--but utterly--to the pretense that he is ANYTHING BUT the direct heir of Ronald Reagan.

He's standing on our shoulders, shitting on our heads.

Broadcast, WWH, 8/22: Zombie Philanthropists

2011-08-22T15:15:00.000-07:00

THANKS, Winston, and, from the High Chihuahuan desert, "Hola" hippies, everywhere!!

Mega/multi/billionaire Warren Buffet made news last week when he declared it was time that the Gummint stopped "coddling"--his word--the wealthy, and taxed them at the same rates that they impose on lesser mortals, such as his own 'hired help."

For which, Buffett won torrents of praise...

Woody sez:

CODS---WALLOP! It's gob-smackingly astonishing that so many are SO credulous as to ALWAYS fall for this corpoRatist excrement!

Because, of course, not Buffett, not Gates, not Jobs, not a single ONE of that top 14 Hundred "Big Money Guys" is in SLIGHTEST FUCKING DANGER of having his taxes raised one red cent. And they know it.

Sitting pretty like they do, it's easy to talk shit. Meanwhile, Buffett, Gates, Jobs and the rest are doing and have done EVERYTHING possible to ensure that not ONE fucking PENNY of their vast, bloodied fortunes EVER returns to the general treasury of the American people from whom they took it..

Instead, they devise elaborate bequeathments to distribute their billions to convivial, "private" (corporate) "charities," where their plans will be accomplished even AFTER the fuckers return to the corruption that our common essence.

They're vampire capitalists, who turn into "zombie" philanthropists.

If Buffett, et al., are really serious about supporting the Republic, let 'em assemble a coalition of willing billionaires, redirect their lobbyists, buy some Senators, oust Murdoch from Fox and, like the feller sez: git 'er done...Otherwise, they're just blowing smoke out their asses, and up ours.

And on that happy note, hasta luego, hippies, and back to Winston Smith in Hippie Central...

As The Cookie Crumbles: System Theory

2011-08-19T04:00:00.000-07:00

(WWH, 8/19/11) Back in the day when I was perfessin (for pay, instead of pro-bono), every semester, sometime in the first couple of meetings of just about any class (in both Education courses, when I was teaching them, and in Journalism courses, when I was teaching those), the subject of 'racism" would rear its smarmy, smirking head, and I would have to embark on the MOST DIFFICULT explanation I have ever tried to undertake in a classroom, and the one with the least possibility that I could establish some sort of accord. The conversation would typically begin when a student would describe the actions or words of some (celebrity) member of a minority group as "racist."

And I would say: "That's almost impossible." And then it would start.

Because "racism" in the USofA IS still so common, so pervasive and, now, with O'Bomber in the WHiteHouse, again recrudescing so obviously and painfully, it is also mainly (and probably to some extent willfully) misunderstood. Racism, I taught, rather than being comprised of individual attitudes and acts of bigotry and/or discrimination, is that system which permits, and encourages, and (perhaps silently) approves--and/or does not at least socially stigmatize-- those individual acts, but instead, normalizes --even valorizes and rewards-- them.

Americans, understandably, hate to regard "racism" as a system, because it implicates EVERYBODY. If you, yourself avoid falling into bigotries or superiorist foibles, you can escape the opprobrium that attaches--or used to --to the accusation. But it's much more accurate than to classify--to "think" about, that is--the despicable acts or attitudes of individual persons not as the disease itself, but as symptoms of the larger, systemic social ill.

"Racism" (it is a redundancy to say "institutional racism," because as I hope I'm explaining, there's no other kind) is a system of social covenants and agreements, some tacit, some explicit by which a majority denies power to a minority on the basis of assumptions about the "superiority/inferiority" summarized in pretty much random morphological distinctions: skin color, eye shape, hair color, etc...

Here's part of the problem: the dictionary. Dictionary.com's first definition of racism: a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

Dictionaries do not "define" words. They index the frequency of definitions. "Racism" IS a specious charge under that simple definition. Such regimen supports the utterly false assertions one always hears around this discussion that blacks are "racists." Which is, except in very special cases, impossible.

Ask yourself who is writing that most frequently used description? Well, who writes most of the books? White People? In the Majority? You think they wanna implicate themselves in something which they seem to want to denigrate and diminish? There are are assholes and asswholery in every group. But "racism" per se CAN only exist where the majority has and uses its power to suppress a minority and to deny it a fair share of the common good(s). Of course yu want avoid the tar on that brush.

Until black people CONTROL the majority of power and wealth, and hold determinative authority as to what constitutes "normalcy," then there simply cannot be any shuch ting--in a white supremacist culture such as this one continues to be--as a "Black racist."

Unless, like Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas and others, the black "racists" cooperate in the suppression of OTHER blacks.

There are are assholes and asswholery in every group. But "racism" per se CAN only exist where the majority has and uses its power to suppress a minority and to deny it a fair share of the common good(s). It is only when you understand that "superiority" is powerless without the system of agreements and practices that ratifies it, and permits, and encourages it that the systematacity of it becomes obvious.

As "sexism" (institutional, also) is a system by which patriarchy retains and maintains power by depriving females such things as the power to decide whether or not to remain pregnant. If you don't regard "racism" as a systemic phenomenon, then it's possible for you to escape allegations of your own complicity. But if it's a system, then we're all implicated. Which how this cookie crumbles...

As The Cookie Crumbles: Experimental States

2011-08-18T06:50:00.000-07:00

(WWH: 8/18/11) For most of us, the most difficult thing to grasp, to understand, about Michelle Bachmann and her ilk--now Rick Perry, Ex-Sen. Frothy Cocktail, Sarah Palin and most of the rest of the GOPhux "Clown Car of Candidates"--is "how they can seem to lie so outrageously, to be in such apparent ignorance of the established "facts," and still be taken seriously?"

The reasons are that, 1) That's the "narrative": Anybody, no matter how bat-shit crazed, can grow up to be PRESIDENT. The CorpoRat/SCUM "press" is under orders (though not necessarily explicit, as at Faux Nooz) from the boardrooms to treat these crazy fucktoids like "serious candidates." And 2) to their acolytes, to the true believers, whether Bachmann, or any of 'em, is "right" or not is utterly immaterial. The important thing is the speaker (Bachmann herself, whoever): to the faithful, what she says is revealed truth.

And, by rules I do not understand, but which limit polite, journalistic discourse, whatever the candidate says is unassailable, and does not HAVE to comport with any known realities. Bachmann's appeal is not about reason, or fact, or logic, or rationality, or anything we'd recognize as reality. What she represents--and now Rick Perry, too--is the emergence--the metastasis, as with a cancerous growth--of a whole cult of shared (possibly fatally), theocratic delusion.

Once the wall between faith and law is breached, any-fucking-body can just stroll through, saying just any ol' shit, and because it is imbued with "faith," and allied--no matter how speciously or spuriously--with "religion, any fucking load of cosdswallop automatically wins an exemption from rational criticism. Theocracy is ALWAYS fascistic, totalitarian. Bachmann is the symptom, not the disease. however.

I've thought for a long time that the US citizenry was being used as subjects in the biggest, longest, most extensive, expensive, expansive, exhaustive behavioristic experiment in history. Foucault said the telos of science is not knowledge but power; that the so-called 'human' sciences were less about understanding and repair than about prediction and control. We see it in action all around us. There is an interestingly apt example in the condition of "learned helplessness" (e.g., Seligman, M. 1967).

"Learned Helplessness" is the macro/social analogue/equivalent of the personal condition, the "double bind," named by Bateson in the 60s. The Greeks had a word for it, too: apoereia. When I learned of Seligman's recent difficulties with the American Psychological Association, I went back to look at his work, and then it started making sense. We're mic'ed up, cam'd up, twittered, texted and globally located, walking data points, in the biggest fuukin Skinner box EVER. And what we're supposed to be learning is "Learned Helplessness."

The principle of "Learned (though it should probably be called "Applied") Helplessness" is cruel and effective. Seligman perfected it torturing dogs, but it has been successfully--albeit surreptitiously--adopted by the Owners to control us, too. You keep giving an animal shocks it connot escape, and pretty soon it stops trying to escape 'em. They use it in conducting interrogations, I'm guessing, since Obama just appointed Seligman the top psychological advisor to the HSA. Here's how it works, (beware, it's not for the sqeamish):

The concept of learned helplessness was discovered accidentally by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier. They had initially observed helpless behavior in dogs that were classically conditioned to expect an electrical shock after hearing a tone. Later, the dogs were placed in a shuttlebox that contained two chambers separated
by a low barrier. The floor was electrified on one side, and not on the other. The dogs previously subjected to the classical conditioning made no attempts to escape, even though avoiding the shock simply involved jumping over a low barrier.

In order to investigate this phenomenon, research then devised another experiment. In group one, the dogs were strapped into harnesses for a period of time and then released. The dogs in the second group were placed in the same harnesses, but were subjected to electrical shocks that could be avoided by pressing a panel with their noses. The third group received the same shocks as those in group two, except that those in this group were not able to control the duration of the shock. For those dogs in the third group, the shocks seemed to be completely random and outside of their control.

Later, the dogs were placed in a shuttlebox. Dogs from the first and second group quickly learned that jumping the barrier eliminated the shock. Those from the third group, however, made no attempts to get away from the shocks. Due to their previous experience, they had developed a cognitive expectation that nothing they did would prevent or eliminate the shocks. (Seligman & Maier, 1967).

(Probably, they had to kill those poor fucking dogs.) And, now, with the assault of the wackloon christoids like Bachmann, and Perry, and to a lesser extent, Palin, Sen. Shit'n'jizm, and others, an already stunned USer polity--still non-plussed by the "failure" of St. Barry, the Changer to actually CHANGE anything-- is undergoing another set of inescapable shocks--the GOPhux "presidential candidates"--designed to render us helpless in the knowledge that we've seen all this before, and there is nothing to do to escape it.

Nothing. It's worth your sanity to look at any of 'em and try to imagine who--what person--would actually vote for ANY of 'em...jeezis!

So, the question becomes: What now? And the answer is: I don't know. I'm personally loathe to take up arms in outright rebellion. For one thing, I'm old and slow, with a bad heart, and little endurance. I don't really WANT to blow this shit up. I like it. I don't wanna awaken to the smells of death. I wouldn't last 6 mos without my meds, and if the system falls, me and my meds will be forever parted. Taps for Woody. RIP..

But, there seems no other alternative, since the electoral option is so obviously flawed and ineffective. People don't care who they're voting IN as long as they're votinvg out the assholes who have betrayed and destroyed them.

.So, tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

-30-

As The Cookie Crumbles (WWH, 8/12): Progress

2011-08-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

(WWH, 8/12/11) Yer ol' Perfesser hates to disagree with someone so thoughtful and persuasive as Captain Compromise, Prez. Barry, but, except in the most trivial sense, he be blowing smoke up your asses when he proclaims: 'The future is going to be determined' by the 2012 election."

No, actually, it's not. For all practical purposes, and absent the specificities which only the instant moment can provide: still, the rough outlines of the "future"--administratively, bureaucratically, politically, economically, socially--are already in place, and we can say with complete, total, undeniable assurance: if you are not 'wealthy'--if you're not among the top 2-5%--your life will be grow ever more desperate, and unpleasant, and brutal, as the President and his myrmidons hand ever more of the "commons" and the 'people's treasure' over to the parasites, privateers and pirates at the top of the privatization pyramid.

Nothing but the names will change. There will be NO--well, trivial, like 'new 'apps'--improvements; there will be no "human" progress; there will be no "world peace," no global prosperity, no conquest of hunger. The USer Empire will spend its last bounty to preserve its external, global, military dominance, to keep up the appearances. It's not good for Empires to decline too publically. It makes 'em look weak and, typically, they've alienated enough folks that looking weak isn't a particularly useful strategy.

And the "people" of the Empire will pay with their personal and social peace, security, safety, and comfort. Inevitably.

So, the wars will roll on incessantly, even if the ostensible CAUSES for them (water, instead of oil; crop-lands, rare-earth, etc) may be altered by circumstance. The human and the rest of the biological lifeworld will continue to be degraded by the irresponsible and increasingly desperate exploitation of raw materials in the maddened scramble for "cheap" energy. The last of the 'top predators' will be extinguished--civilized man can abide NO competition. Diversity in the biosphere will degrade and eventually disappear. The 'consumer' mono-culture will spread, infecting everything it touches...until it's nemesis evolves, as they always do: the Super-bug.

That's what's going to happen, no matter WHO the fuck bears the title of "President." But the GOPhux don't want their names on it.

On a related note: "The real goal of the GOP is not to fix the economy or drive down the debt or create jobs, but to make Obama a one-term president."

That's what they say,

...but do they mean it? I don't think they don't mean it. Oh, rhetorically, yeah, they've got to say it. But the GOPhux aren't stupid. They KNOW they NEED O'bomber to have another term. He's going to need that time to soak up the rest of the shit that's been left lying around stinkin' up the place since Reagan soiled his last dependz.

St. Barry, the Compromiser, is fuukin GREAT for the GOPhux; they get everything from him they want and they get to say THEY made the compromises. He's the best President the T-jihadists could ever want.

This reminds me of '08, and McCain/Palin. Putting Palin on the ticket with Bombin' John, the ship-killer, was a signal. It signalled that the GOPhux campaign from thence forth was going to be a charade. It signalled they were throwing it to the Dims.

If the GOPhux really wanted it in '12, they'd have some kind of half-way plausible, 'electable' candidate. There'd be a candidate they could steal it for: Jeb Bush, for example. They don't, so they don't. O'Bomber's safe as a drone pilot on a combat mission.

Nobody'd believe the Murkin people were stupid enough to 'elect' Bachmann, Palin, Gingrich, even Mittens, or any of the rest of the Clown Car. But watch who they run in '16, when O'Bomber retires (as the most reviled ex-President ever) to join the All-Murkin Pantheon with JFK, RFK, FDR, AND MLK...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

WWH ~~ Radio Rant: (FTIWP-MM)

2011-08-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, Winston! An' HEYHEY, hippies!

The single biggest, MOST influential voting bloc in the country is that bloc of "Frightened, Threatened, Insecure White People (Mostly Males)" (the "FTIWP-MM").

You can spot 'em, easy: their FURY (at the diminishment of their privilege), their RESENTMENT (at the "inferiors" who would replace them), and their stark, crawling FEAR (that they'll someday be subjected to the same treatment they meted out when they had power).

Candidates who play to/prey upon those factors will dominate the political arena for AT LEAST as long as the FTIWP-MM retain the demographic/ numerical and(it goes without saying) their economic advantages...I give 'em about 50 years...

Against this backdrop, we have the President slightly disingenuously declaring that there is "something wrong" with our politics?"

Waddaya think? Might it be that the President, elected in near-veneration as a "Democrat," steadfastly refuses to govern as even a NOMINAL "Democrat" might/could be expected to govern;

refuses to announce or propose "Democratic" programs,

refuses to defend core "Democratic" principles--

or ANY "principles" really, other than the tired litanies of CorpoRat obeisance: globalism, and so-called "Free trade."

For there to be a functioning "two-party system," no matter how flaccid and weak, still it requires there to be (wait for it) ........TWO FUCKING PARTIES: The President's party and the party of the loyal opposition.

So, when did the President CEASE to be the chief spokesperson, the veritable VOICE of their party? The Chimperor Bush was the unabashed leader of the GOPhux, the cheerleader for the Party line. Without Obama's voice, the DIMs have no voice.

Where there is only one functioning "party," and an ostensible "leader" who remains neutral, and "above the fray," there is craven dereliction and rejection of founding principles they swear to uphold; and it is of THAT that I think President Obama stands indicted by his every compromising (and compromised) breath..

On that happy note, Hasta luego, hippies...and back to you, Winston...

As the Cookie Crumbles (8/10/11): Blame

2011-08-10T05:03:00.002-07:00

(WWH~~8/10) The "American people" are not going to like, and are not in any way ready to hear, that the "bestest, greatest, wonderfulest, freest, richest, country in the whole world, EVAR!," is reaching the end of its run at the front.

It's not gonna go down well, but it's happening, undeniably, before our very eyes.

And so the outline of (what I've argued all along was) the actual purpose--the real reason--for having St. Barry elected in the first place is lately beginning to emerge and take its oozing shape in the discourse of the beefy, oxy-addicted cheerleader-n-chief of the Rightoid echo chamber, the reekingly feculent, cripplingly shit-encysted, vigorously Viagrized terror of Dominican pool-boys EVERYWHERE, Rush Limbaugh.

LIMBAUGH (SEZ) OBAMA ENGINEERED THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICA.

"In his blistering attack on Obama and the Democrats, Limbaugh asserted that “we have a president that’s overseeing — engineering — the decline of the American republic.”

And actually, I wish he were right. Anybody with a brain larger than that of a prawn has known for 10 years that the era of USer primacy was/is waning. China's economy is predicted to surpass that of the US in 2015-15. That will certainly be interpreted as one piece of evidence that the crown is passing to the West, again...If indeed, our economic hegemony survives THAT long, in the face of on-going challenges, the most extreme being INTERNAL! But I digress...

The difference between flying and falling is all in the landing. I wish O'Bomber were the technocrat who was put in charge to engineer the first stages of the soft-landing of the plummeting American Empire as it crashes inevitably back to the ground. I wish I thought that St. Barry were a skilled pilot, with the ability to set the country on a course that avoids the catastrophic crash and skids in on a cushion of foam.

Because it is, indeed, undeniable that the power and influence of the USer Empire is waning. It is evident in our extravagantly unsuccessful, wasteful, inglorious, bloody military adventures abroad, and in the collapse of the polity at home: where poverty accelerates, joblessness increases, hom foreclosures continue at record rates, prices grow unrestrictedly, while wages shrink and the Government pulls BACK crucial, life-preserving programs and agencies for the most vulnerable--who now amount to about 25% of the population.

Decline happens to ALL empires, everywhere. It was/is inevitable: though the SHAPE of the decline is not immutable, the fact of it is. And St. Barry is the guy chosen to 'preside' over the first, hard, "irrefudiatable" evidence of it. This was/is not an accident.

This is NOT going to be easy for the average American to confront. Exceptionalism is NOT waning; jingoism and militant nationalism are abroad on the land as seldom before. Nativism is burgeoning. The spectre that "WE'RE #2, or 3" or anything other than #1 could well spawn a backlash of international aggression by USers unwilling to concede their places in the world. They're gonna NEED a fall-guy. Obviously, if that fall-guy were a member of a despised race, and a "minority/majority" party, this would be the best outcome for the White Owners.

Barry's that designated guy.

The Empire was/is falling anyway, no matter who's nominally in charge, under the weight of its own corruption, criminality, extravagance, supply lines and intrinsic evil. But SOMEBODY's gotta be to blame. The disappointed, terrified jingos will demand it.

So the Owners tabbed our Ecru Crusader/Dims to take the rap.

This works on several levels: 1) it absolves WHITE people, 2) it absolves the GOPhux, and 3) forecloses the possibility of there EVER again being another Dim/novelty/soshulist presidential candidate. WIN-WIN-WIN!

(It should be remembered that 1) he's a smart (Constitutional scholar) fella who 2) MUST have known this going in and 3) did it ANYWAY!)

A correspondent asked: "But if he knew this going in and did it anyway 1) why not fight like hell for the people since he has nothing to lose and 2) then he's not that smart after all.

I replied: Two reasons.

(First), because he doesn't care about those causes. (He's the "pragmatist," remember, and) he was hired to do a particular job--not the least part of which is to drive the final nail into the New Deal...

(Second: It's not true that he's got nothing to lose.) He's gonna live a LONG TIME after his tenure in the WhiteHouse. He's gonna need a lotta money, rich friends, a big house, stuff like that. If he'd rebelled, he'da lost all that...

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it's difficult to convince someone to do the "right thing" if, by doing it, one forecloses on one's comfortable retirement.

As the Cookie Crumbles (8/09/11): Solutions

2011-08-09T13:30:00.001-07:00

(WWH, 8/9/11) Some folks say: Hey Dr. Woody! You sher gotta lot to SAY about stuff. What do you DO about it, huh?

I have not heard the same complaints leveled against the "professional" economists, and one thing I notice about their commentaries is that they often includes lists of things that should be done, even if doing them was rendered impossible by any number of existential hurdles and obstacles. Though I am not a professional economist, nevertheless, I inferred from this that proposing a short list of suggestions by means of the institution of which the solutions to our national crises and dilemmas could be achieved, is a way to demonstrate 'seriusness.' So I thought I might disperse my own critics with a similar list, and here it is: Dr. Woody's Four Ways To Solve All Our Problems and Decline Prosperously Into Imperial Obscurity

Solution #1: "Save" Social Security by removing the income cap. It's now solvent through 2038. Increasing the cap to $200K would fix things through 2075. Lower retirement age to 60.
Solution #2:
Tax the wealthy: Institute a the Robin Hood tax ,(.05%) on all stock and bond transfers. Raise the top, marginal tax rate to 50%, over $5 mil.
Solution #3: End the (fucking ) wars. Close overseas bases, down-size the USer war machine...(Who the FUCK is gonna attack us? We still have more than 5000 independently targetable warheads; probably some in space. C'mon!)
Solution #4: Universalize Medicare. The "debt" is not the most pressing or the biggest money problem out there. That's the national health system. In private hands, it will NEVER not expand to the profit motive. Remove the profit motive.

See there? Problems: Solved

Of course nothing I suggested is politically doable. Every item would run into unbreachable opposition from all relevant quarters...and millions, as well.

I just figgered I'd join the pundit parade and put out a list of totally impractical, undoable shit so it would look like I was DOING SOMETHING. So the next time somebody says: "Jeezus, Woody. Why'ncha DO SOMETHING??? Instead of just bitching all the time?"

Well now ya got my solutions! You know, like the old chemistry joke: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate...

As The Cookie Crumbles: Sloppy Thirds

2011-08-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

(WWH, 8/8/11) Amid all the sound and fury about who and/or what is the "real Obama," there is one intriguing possibility that hasn't been much discussed yet: "Is Obama, in fact, in addition to being the first "non-White" president, the first "Third Party" president?" And by that I mean, is he the first "Supra-Party" president, a "leader" who claims no allegiance to either Congressional party, but unabashedly serves the CorpoRat agenda? Aloof and above the fray, does he thereby ensure that the regimen of the powerful prevails? With him, have they finally abandoned the pretense of partisanship--perhaps as too expensive?

He was 'elected' as a "Democrat." But he sure doesn't govern like a Democrat (other than Bill Clinton who, by almost all accounts was the one of the most successful GOPhux presidents of the 20th Century). Shabama gives good speech, and so retains rhetorical appeal to his acolytes and Koolaid slurpers. But his record does not support claims that his is anything but a continuation of the Corporatist agenda that has held 'government" in a strangle-hold grip since the 1980s.

Still, he categorically rejects insinuations or out-right accusations that he should cast off the 'sheep's clothing,' and proudly take his place as the acknowledged head of the Party of Property. Tactically, that would be a mistake, of course, because if he called himself a "Republican," which does appear to be how he governs--with an easy hand on the reins of regulatory power and sympathy first for the claims of the CorpoRats--THAT would alienate that significant portion of the rabid Rightoid t-hadists which comprises probably more than HALF of the GOPhux constituency, and which rejects him on pigmentation issues.

So, if he was elected as a Democrat, yet he eschews in every significant case the principles of historic Democratic "commitments," and neither Prez. Shamwow himself nor the Republicans want/can to acknowledge their essential synonymies, could it be Barry, the Bomber, is, in fact, the first president of a new, anomalous, post-partisan politics. As all distinctions between the two nominal parties have begun to dissolve into an homogenous amalgam of generic, corpoRatist boilerplate, and spurious libertarianisms, St. Barry, the Compromiser, calmly, and evenly dials down, adjusts the expectations of the people to accept less: lower salary, less "public service," but higher prices, and less value.

ThePrez always claimed he admired Reagan because Reagan's was a "transformative" presidency. In a funny way, the O suffers from the same psychological malady that afflicted his predecessor, the Chimperor Bush: father issues. For both, the driving energy may derive from the (dare I call it Freudian?) desire to surpass Pop.

To the Shrub, it meant destroying Saddam, and thereby proving to his mother his disk was as big as his daddy's. For Obama, it means surpassing his surrogate, his political "Dad"/father-figure, Raygun, in "transforming" American political culture. And as with this propensity for compromise, it matters less to him what the result looks like--what has been transformed/compromised--than the process itself.

I think he'll try to notch the scalps of the teachers' unions, myself. That would beat Daddy Raygun's PATCO victory. And in doing so--a nominal Democrat attacking and undermingin a traditional Democratic ally like the teachers--that'll signal the arrival of the "Third Party!"

So be wary of that for which we wish...

As The Cookie Crumbles (WWH, 8/5): Relief Valve

2011-08-05T07:06:00.001-07:00

Prob'ly in honor of the celebration today by ThePrez of his 50th natal anniversary, the F-Book Thursday morning was awash in, literally flooded with, encomiums pledging fealty to St. Barry, the capitulator, and honoring his countless, storied accomplishments...possibly, also, to strew a trail of sweet-smelling spin atop the vile, feculent reek of the "compromise" to which he agreed Sunday night. One repeated Rachel Maddow, anticipating perhaps the fate of Cenk Ugyur, dutifully extolled the alleged, "nearly 85% success rate" of O'Bomber's return on campaign promises (though as a Christmas offering last year, not for his birthday this year, it was old 'news').

We ought not to wonder at this wanton, slurping, proctile lavation, or think it odd or excessive. Rach works for MSNBC. That's the same folks who told Cenk that "people" in DC didn't like his "abrasive" tone (with/about the regime) just before they fired him for having the best ratings in his time-slot. Rachel's just keepin' her job--

...Which JOB is to be a safety valve for the disaffection, disapproval, and disappointment of a people systematically being shorn of their citizenhood while they stand, entranced by the flickering, blue screen. Rach, and Keith, and Fat Eddie, and Stewart and Colbert, too (along with Hannity, Beck, the golden "Gretchens," Doocey, Limbarf and O'Reilly, as well) are all useful agents of, and all fulfill that archetypically hegemonic function: You/we/them hear all their ranting, and spewing, and it sounds JUST LIKE YOU WANT TO SAY IT, and boy it sounds terrific, like somebody powerful's speaking MY concerns...and then they pass and are forgotten with the rest. But having heard them SPOKEN, in PUBLIC, folks feel much better about taking it in the ass the next time; no, really; there's research...

The Owners' hegemonic formations--because they own the media--have virtually (heh) infinite paths by which to draw off any possibly dangerous emanations of popular venom. Everything serves that purpose, even (paradoxically) those things or personae which appear to focus attention on the system's weaknesses. Mass media alienated people; personal media atomize them.

Here's one you'll never see on MSNBC. It's long; 1 hour, 53 minutes. But you won't notice how quickly the time goes by. And you don't have to watch it all. You can just listen, to most of it. Do so, attentively. It'll be on the test...

As The Cookie Crumbles (8/3): War Story

2011-08-03T05:01:00.001-07:00

(WWH) The difference between a war story and a fairy tale? Fairy-tales begin "Once upon a time..." War stories start: "No shit, man, I was there..."

The day, August 2, and tomorrow, August 4, in 1964, were days fraught with then-unknown significance to the members of my--early--cohort of the Baby Boom. It's the dates of the so-called "Gulf of Tonkin Incident," when two US Navy destroyers (which were inside North Vietnamese waters, doing ComInt, and one of which, the USS Turner Joy, is pictured on the left) falsely reported they had been attacked by North Vietnamese "gun-boats." The war-hawks in Congress, eager to once again liberate the free-flowing expenses (and profits) of war, immediately, and furiously, demanded LBJ "do something."

Johnson launched air attacks on the North, and announced a troop build up. And thus began the escalation (later, and elsewhere, called a "surge") which would put nearly 200,000 troops into Vietnam within 17 months, and more than TWO MILLION of them eventually--among them, for a very brief and uneventful term, y'r ob'd't S'v't. In the end:

9,087,000 military personnel served on active duty during the Vietnam Era (5 August 1965-7 May 1975)

3,403,100 (including 514,300 offshore) personnel served in the SE Asia Theater (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, flight crews based in Thailand and sailors in adjacent South China Sea waters).

2,594,000 personnel served within the borders of South Vietnam (I January 1965 - 28 March 1973)

Another 50,000 men served in Vietnam between 1960 and 1964

7,484 women served in Vietnam, of whom 6,250 or 83.5% were nurses.

The number KIA (Killed In Action) keeps creeping up. Through foresight or inadvertence, there was space left on the Wall for later additions. (The number has risen from 58,178 to 58,212 since 1997.)

I was sitting beside the little, postage-stamp pool at La Fonda hotel, keeping watch, and admiring the pleasingly round bottoms of several sorority sisters from Texas Women's University, when I heard about the Tonkin Incident in the hourly headline news on the radio, and I knew something was afoot. It was my job to lounge beside the La Fonda pool; I was the life-guard. It was my duty to oversee the tanning and occasional dips in said postage-stamp-sized pool enjoyed by the coveys of round-bottomed Dallas beauties who came there with their parents--or, often enough, without them--for summer vacations. I had enlisted in the USAF after high school, in May of '64, but deferred induction til after the summer (you could do that then; I dunno today), so that I could spend my "summer of 64" in just such hedonistic pursuits.

When I enlisted, in May, I was not terribly attuned to the world, as a callow youth, in a dusty backwater town in the desert of the Southwest. But things were pretty quiet. Student anti-war demonstrations had begun, back east, but I was unaware of 'em. I was not then considered prime college material: I had the test scores, but had seldom notched a grade above a C in my entire high school career (marks of what is now called ADA/ADHD, was then called "Great Potential"). I cannot say then that I thought the war would grow. I was just looking for a way to hang out for a while, and avoid the draft. Four years didn't seem like that long a time. I HAD thought of it as an adventure.

By July, '64, there had still been fewer than 400 KIA in Nam, in total. And probably pretty few of them had been Air Force. So enlisting seemed like a pretty good deal. And it was; I freely admit that I had sweet duty, pretty much the whole time. My life was never once in any serious danger for enemies of any kind. I had some incredible experiences. I learned a new language (German), and saw most of the sights thought worth seeing in post-war Western Europe. I was in England, in Liverpool, the day they won the Cup; the town went fuuking WILD. I saw Jim Clarke race at Nurburgring. I walked through Mozart's house in Salzburg. I was in an orgy in a hippie hostel in the Montrieul section of Paris, and saw sun-rise in the Bois du Boulogne. I skied in the Alps. I dallied with numerous women in and around the Saar region of Germany. Oh, yeah: I engaged in mundane, tedious tasks associated with gathering and processing data related to Soviet (and other) air-traffic communications, too.

In '64, sometime after I enlisted, but before I was inducted, I sent a letter to the local paper in which I extolled the nobility of the cause of anti-communism and pledged myself to propogate it. Then I went off and did. And I dodged the bullet. A lot of my friends were not so fortunate. So on days like this, when the reminder pops up like the bobber on the end of s fishing line, I think about them, and the millions of others, Americans and Asians, who died, or were sorely injured, and writhe, inwardly, still, in the knowledge that it was ALL a a conscious, deliberate fucking lie.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Someone on the F-Book today was bemoaning the fact that "social issues" seeme to get in the way of possible cooperation among different cultural sects and cults. I sympathized, but:

All "social issues" are at base "political issues," about the appropriation and distribution of power. I.e..: Abortion is an issue of phallo-centric physical power--the power to compel childbirth; religion is about the imposition of psychological power--to compel "belief" and obedience. Wealth is ALL about the power to command the profits of communal efforts. Rights are about the power to live without fear of the majority. It's ALL about power, so it's ALL "political."

I couldn't make common political cause with a person or a group who worked to outlaw abortion, or to unregulate industry, or to haphazardly invade distant "enemies." I wouldn't have anything else in common with 'em, assuming there were one thing that might unite us in the first place.