>As The Cookie Crumbles: Pain In The Ass

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)

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

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

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---

As The Cookie Crumbles: Frame Up

‎"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

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...