Friday, February 27, 2015

The Problem With Obama

Obama's problem is that he is too good a guy. He's so unfamiliar with the kind of resentment he's facing he doesn't see the viciousness of it. He doesn't get it even though he gets hammered with it incessantly.

He grew up in Hawaii, after all, the closest thing around to Eden or Shangri La. The goodness reflects well on him but it means he can't do his job and it's too late on that anyway. I read something once about women.

That there are mechanisms in women preventing them from fully and viscerally remembering what childbirth is like because, if they did, they would never have more than one child.

Maybe there's a mechanism in men which resists the realization of the horror of violence and interpersonal aggression, hence humanity's terrible record there and Obama's obtuseness and that of his attackers.

Whatever. But I think we got the wrong Obama. Michelle, now, is a different kettle. Forgive me, Rahm, but Chicago is no Shangri La. Michelle gets it. I want her for president. She would kick some Republican ass.

So, speaking of asses, let's draft hers, with Barack in a good supporting job. He was only halfway there on the blackness and he's a man. Michelle has it all going on: unambiguously black, female, and a buttkicker, I'll bet.

She won't want the job and who can blame her but for once we need someone who has the sense not to want it. She'll straighten things out and maybe save us all. We would also save a fortune on the transition.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

The Feminine Mistake

Boy, did the lefties ever blow it with white women. By counting on them as voters, that is. They don't vote Democratic and only God knows how many male voters the Democrats lost by turning themselves into the pity party under the influence of women. The votes didn't come back in return.

White women vote consistently Republican, and Democratic women won't even shut up about the women's stuff but go on stridently self-righteous and gender-centric. At least they should shift their attacks against the Republicans in the direction of human rights instead of women's rights.

And here's to shutting up. Please, some more of that. The indignation seems feigned and the air of superiority wears thin in the face of the voting record, which is awful.




Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Non-Restrictive Clauses Do Get Commas

Maybe now I'll be able to remember this while I'm writing.

The Irish in Us

The whole conservative voting-bloc on the Supreme Court is Catholic, guys who came away from the Church with two things: a love of authority and the ability to rationalize anything. Black is white? No problem, the Jesuits taught them how to cope with that. Also, in a way, they never got off their knees.

So they demand that everyone else kneel as well or it unnerves them. Humanity must collectively kneel. You must not only respect authority but from a position of acknowledged subservience and dependency. I actually kind of agree with this but not politically. It should be voluntary and a church thing in America.

The separation of church and state is not only anathema to those justices but an impossibility because religion "informs" morality and morality "informs" the political system, so they're getting real with us and unreal with the law. Something had to give, and better that people be flat on their asses than standing.

Because it's an insult to God otherwise and a threat to the social order, an order in which they happen to be rich and powerful, by the grace and will of You-Know-Who. This is why they're on the same page as the KKK when it comes to freedom. Too much means disorder, so they like them some freedom but not too much of it.

At least in our hands. You constrain it to protect the system. So how about those Irish-Catholic hosts and commentators on conservative cable news? You would expect their psyches to have been well "informed" by the potato famine but, hell, they're just like the English now, looking down at other people for dying.

How undignified! No matter that we killed them or at least caused them to die with our invadey impulses. Heirarchy is, after all, the way of nature and of God. The invadey crowd happen to have landed at the top so the game stops there, by decree, but if we want to get uppity with them they do have lots of guns. Lots.

And they aren't afraid to use them. They probably sit on the shitter with gun in hand. They're packing all over the place. Some day our persons will all be like James Bond's Aston Martin, as the gadgetry gets better, with hidden weapons everywhere and we'll be able to blow smoke out our asses in retreat.

And maybe put down an oil slick. Every kind of cool thing. All under the auspices of the Divine Will. Who knew that religious devotion and correctness could take us there. God, I'm sure, looks down with astonishment at what He is said to have wrought through the good works of those justices and their allies.


Tuesday, February 24, 2015

He's Got the Hat

There are images you wish you could get out of your head and they won't go. One for me is a photo I saw of Bill O'Reilly in an "American Patriot" hat. I thought "now I know we've lost" because, well, he has the hat so he must be the patriot. 

And they've got their "Real American" caps and clean-living, hard-working guy caps and loyal citizen caps and endless other ones, including "Saved," though it turns out that Bill's "been there, done that" combat cap was a load of horse snot. 

The cap does not make the man, but the man the cap, it seems, and creatively. O'Reilly and Company are not any of the things they claim but creators of illusion and confusion, and with a hat there to help. They should do sneakers, too, Air-O'Reilly's and such.

Designed for fleeing and evasion, the fucking cowardsWhat an insult this is to those Americans sent off to risk their lives at war, and in some cases to lose them, by these self-congratulating, fear-mongering suckers-off-the-system. How many houses does O'Reilly have now?

And what is his net worth? Man, the cynicism must be vast, acres of it, growing like kudzu, since they're never properly called out on their crap, meaning they should lose their jobs and their money and their status for their lies. It's all they care about, that stuff and their vanity.

They should all be pariahs and forced to wear penance hats for some period, with something silly and humiliating on them, like "suck-face." It would serve them right.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Civil Offense, or Just 'Cause

It's silly to pretend that America isn't an aggressor nation. We're precocious at it, a case of early onset adventurism. Where do we get off deciding every other country in the western hemisphere cedes their self determination to us?

Which we did and now our moral authority is gone. Since the end of the cold war our power and presumption burgeon and bristle, out of sync with our moral and ethical development, but we're too drunk on consumer goods to care.

We're a hideous, mutant, belching baby throwing tantrums and screaming for more, and now it's not only the western hemisphere but the world we have in sight. The world will suffer for it, even more than they have already.

The Primal Directive

So if we were a starship these days what would we be about? The country is so politically divided it would fall apart if it comprised one starship, but so-called conservatives are running everything now and their starship would be interesting, a tool for intergalactic plundering.

They're kind of like the BORG, too, being so intolerant of dissent as to indicate a shared consciousness. Remember, they wanted to kill John Roberts over one bad vote, and some poor, rookie congresswoman was threatened with annihilation for the same reason.

You would not want to mess with them. They're warlike like Klingons. When they want something they want it bad, and they want more: more money, more power, more control. This M. O. only works if they're the most potent entity around. They take what they want by any means.

Irrespective even of efficiency. They seem sometimes to go postal just for practice or to blow off steam, though it may be as a warning to potential rivals. They've declared open-season on us all, in so doing. If a more powerful player shows up we'll be toasted by the photon torpedoes.

They don't care. They'll declare it the "second coming" and stretch their arms out to Jesus, the fucking idiots. Their starship would have a nice name, like FREEDOM or HERITAGE or even ENTERPRISE, as part of the disguise, but the record is there. They're only out for more resources.

And woe to you if you stand in the way.

The Pain Inuring Post Partum Picaninny Food Deprivation Act and Military Adventurism And Torture Funding To The Gills Bill

This is another bill. I'm hoping it will win the heart of Tom Cotton and make it to the floor with his support. It seems a good fit for him.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

The Pain Ready Already Born Iraqi Heathen Child Protection And Reeducation Act and Genocide Reauthorization Bill

I can only hope the Republican-led Congress will support the bill I'm proposing through my legally-elected representative, Thom Tillis, in an effort to get him off his hand-washing kick. Iraq, after all, is a bit of an abortion all its own. A Republican abortion. They should all travel there and see how their nation-building is working out.

Iraq is arguably the cradle of civilization, anyway, and a cradle is just one step from a womb and wombs are high on their list of interests and heavily investigated by them. Maybe there, in Iraq, they will discover the womb of civilization, maybe Eden, and stay there in that wonderful society they have aided and nurtured. 

GNN

Continuing this jag I'm on about news, I saw that the KKK is out again in Alabama or Arkansas all worried about the decline of everything good. To my disbelief they still think Jews run the media, so I'm targeting a network to them, the white supremacists, called GNN, the Goyim News Network. 

The plan is to take as much of their money as possible, thereby diverting it from Pat Robertson, and give it to the JDL. If they catch me I'll claim it's the Jesus Defense League. The Klan membership tops every list I've ever seen of incomprehensibly stupid and gullible white people, so it should work.

Conniption News

I have a plan to save CNN. Firstly it must cease to be CNN, as we know it. There are times when the middle ground is a no-man's land and this is one of those. It's not that they do their thing poorly but that they are doing the wrong thing. The world has changed and CNN hasn't.

The new way is high emotional-content reporting. News organizations now own their subjectivity and run with it. The reinvention of CNN will be so pronounced it will be unnecessary to sell the transformation to the public. It will sell itself. Conventional reporting is dead. 

Let's bury it. The lines between news and entertainment aren't blurred but nonexistent. It was an illusion that there was ever a distinction. Since the change in actual reporting will be dramatic it would be an enormous waste to change the name "CNN" itself, so it will be kept.

But it now stands for the CONNIPTION NEWS NETWORK, a division of TANTRUM MEDIA. This is modeled on certain right-wing news sources, whose ratings speak for themselves, that being the democracy of the marketplace. If the people want garbage you feed them garbage.

 It's happy-meal journalism. Enjoy.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Long-Term Capital Mismanagement

Here's one for the fact column. We knew in 1998 that hedge funds weren't hedging anything. Any hedging going on was courtesy of the free insurance American taxpayers were providing to a bunch of already fantastically wealthy people. Not a bad gig for those rich people.

We knew it because in 1998 a hedge fund imploded and the feds had to step in and ensure it didn't screw the economy up too badly. In other words, we covered their asses. Two of the fund's directors had invented the math which made derivatives markets possible.

They won a NOBEL PRIZE for it. This was as close as you could get to a controlled experiment showing that derivatives markets and hedge funds and reckless investment banking were evil and irresponsible and should have been banned or taxed into oblivion.

But that didn't happen because one of the things these rich people buy is protection, just like with the mob, protection from regulation. This is called "regulatory capture," when those supposedly being regulated buy off the regulators, fixing the game in their favor.

So we are fucked. This is why the whole world economic system nearly ceased to exist in 2008 and why the pathetic re-regulation enacted after that mess is being attacked and repealed by Republicans who are characteristically on their knees before rich people.

This is not government, let alone inclusive, democratic government, but organized criminal activity and thuggery. It's an insult to anyone who ever gave a shit about anything. Those rich people don't. It's all just barbarism made up to look civilized, hoping no one notices.

Typically, Thomas Frank expressed something essential about this when reflecting on the death of Harold Ramis, one of the writers of ANIMAL HOUSE. Recall when certain persons borrowed a Cadillac in that movie and returned it looking a lot like that '08 economy.

Their defense? How could you be stupid enough to entrust us with something nice you actually care about? Those are the people running everything. It's Bluto-land. I must be in a bad mood but this pisses me off. I used to be proud to be an American, when I was younger.

But the America I was proud to be a part of doesn't exist anymore. We threw it away for nothing. NOTHING! Out of carelessness and distraction. We are the loser generation running through its inheritance. Future generations will despise us. What a waste.

Monday, February 16, 2015

What the World Needs Now is Guns, Sweet Guns: Our Zeitgeist

Are the Chapel Hill shootings the story of a hate crime or of a mentally ill person? A story about personal space played out in a parking lot? A couple or all of these, I'm sure, but more than anything an NRA, gun rights, second amendment nonstarter of a story.

A nonstarter because if you try to take guns away from Americans or even prevent them from increasing their arsenals or even so much as talk about it they will go nuts and probably shoot you. In fact they may do that in anticipation of it, from anxiety, as they have shown.

With regard to Barack Obama. They thought he looked like a guy who might go after their guns so they went ahead and went nuts, just to be on the safe side, as did that pig of a white guy who shot those intelligent, attractive, responsible, law-abiding young Muslims.

He was just being proactive and forward thinking in ensuring a well-run parking situation for everyone. So he overdid it a little. Nowhere near so much as George Bush did cowboying his way into Iraq and was he ever held responsible? I want a library of my own.

To justify the stupid shit I've done in my life. It's only fair. We might not like how it looks but that pig of a white guy is us. It's what we now stand for. To the extent that there is a unified Muslim menace we are Nazis. If we're going to go broad-brush we need to be consistent.

And apply the same brush to ourselves. The Nazis were as representative of white, western, Christian culture as ISIS is of Islam. I'm really against tribalism and Muslims may actually be more tribal than Christians but we can't know what the truth is.

Because we started messing with them, in our arrogance and presumption, and might have caused them to go tribal on us, instead of only tribal on themselves. Our record on this is not as good as we like to think and the Middle East is our parking lot.

A self-declared area of strategic interest. And we happen to have all these guns sitting around, our munitions, so it's no surprise they get used rashly at times and with little or no provocation. The stuff is so cool and easily deployed and we're so enamored of it.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Open Source Journalism

I have an idea for a new kind of journalism, open-source. Any one can contribute, subject to the contribution being deemed an improvement, as judged by the Lord High Moderator, me. Original articles would be supplied by me and other writers approved of by me. 

I guess this is a wiki but I want it to be monarchical. 

No Yeomen

Where are our yeomen? The Supreme Court is ruled by people who call themselves "originalists" and a certain political faction seems to rant on about the Constitution in direct proportion to their disregard for it, but those revolutionary times were super different from our own.

There were yeomen, or the equivalent, lower class people with land and therefore some stake in the society. Lower class, that is, in relation to the founders, who were upper class people. But the country then evolved with the ideals put in place by the upper class guys, enlightened ideas and ideals.

The ideals were inclusive, for that era. I think the Declaration and Constitution exhibit a kind of survey bias. The founding documents embody the Enlightenment idealism of the founders and only partly reflect the reality of their lives and the times, so the documents are aspirational to a degree. 

This is good, but it places a burden on us, the inheritors of those documents and their idealism. We have done okay, by the standards of the sad history of human governance. It didn't hurt that we were loosed on a continent full of unexploited natural resources with the know-how to exploit them.

And a continent largely depopulated by depredation and disease, depredation by us. It was our destiny, evidently manifestly. We got up a hell of a head of steam and then realized that the natural resources weren't in fact limitless. So we thoughtlessly embraced plundering other places.

Notably the Middle East, where God mistakenly left a lot of oil in the hands of heathen. Again the writing is on the wall. Those resources have a limit. And again it appears that thoughtless plundering is option number one. But why? And where are our yeomen or their equivalent?

That would be our disappearing middle class, people at least invested in the society, if not landowners, and engaged in primally productive stuff. That shit went to China, because of a political system corrupted by money and emptied of Enlightenment optimism and idealism. 

And this is to say nothing of the lower classes, which were increasingly enfranchised as the burden of those ideals of the founders played out in real life, but they are now super-screwed. Now all the good stuff goes to people unfamiliar with primally productive activity, hangers-on and inheritors of wealth. 

Everyone else is disempowered. They're internationalists, among other things, our new ruling class, and not rooted to any land, region or productive activity, unlike their predecessors. The whole system assumes this rootedness, enfranchisement and idealism. Without it we are lost.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Canard Cruises

The famous seven dwarves testimony from 1994 has been on my mind lately. It was hard to regard it as emblematic of anything at the time. A bunch of rich guys, CEOs, showed that they had sold their souls and it didn't seem like a big deal. After all, they got a good price.

Those people were paid well by the tobacco companies. But I think it's been on my mind because it was, in fact, emblematic. Americans will do anything for money. Money is powerful enough without being associated with moral goodness and the approval of God. 

But with it?

Total crack cocaine. It's a puritanical innovation, I believe, that association, but you convince them of that. I think it's not possible. Nobody even seems to care enough to ask the pertinent questions. There's an entire entity, FOX NEWS, devoted to the denial of reality.

Not to say that they're liars. They may be delusional. But they are well paid and it makes me suspicious. The stuff they put out there is as patently and provably untrue as "nicotine is not addictive" and they go unchallenged. Their ratings are great and they make lots of money.

There's no equivalent in opposition to their propaganda machine, meaning a reality machine. Maybe reality is too mundane. That faction, those insisting on sanity, isn't getting the job done. A lot of it is the money. The motivation at FOX NEWS is all enmeshed with that.

I view FOX like a cruise line. Canard Cruises, let's say. The ships stay out of port until they sink, which they eventually must, because they are unsupported by reality. The passengers have to live on whatever they embark with in the way of ideas, floating around all misinformed.

One boat is the BIRTHER QUEEN, captained by Orly Taitz, which ran aground in Hawaii. Another is the CREATIONIST, which is floundering about somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. And the HOMOPHOBIA is taking on water off a nude gay beach in the Bahamas.

SUPPLY SIDE and RISING TIDE, sister ships, previously sank but have been raised and are again out at sea with paying passengers. I mean, how much can a good, used gunboat cost these days, I find myself wondering, but the complicity of the people on those ships is uncertain.

The well-paid people at CANARD don't care at all about them at all and those higher up in the food chain are really making out, in real time, so they don't care even if FOX ultimately fails. The investment is about income and the income is immense.

So the whole cruise line is sinking along with its ships under the weight of the craziness. The sad thing is the damage they leave behind. This wonderful country of ours--wonderful in spite of its many faults--is left way worse off by these people and their fantastic greed.

Wrong on Race and Everything Else

What you see now in a state like North Carolina, heading backwards in a hurry, is extreme defensiveness on the one front, the denial of the wrong being done, and inappropriate pride in achievements accomplished elsewhere or by people not identified with the system.

Like Dean Smith and the Wright Brothers. North Carolina has rejected everything Dean stood for, and the Wright Brothers had nothing to do with the state. What we should put on our plates is "from the state that gave you lung cancer," and we should get back to white-boy basketball. 

North Carolina has returned to being about privilege and exclusion, so it's just disingenuous to pretend otherwise. As recent scandals have proven, the state is very happy to use young, black college athletes like horses in stables, and then it's off to the glue factory on graduation. 

Monday, February 9, 2015

The Artificial Honkey

I've got a new job for my 3-D printer, making effigies of the white guys running things here in the South, for use in various ways representing their well-paid subservience to the interests of big business and America's wealthy elite.

They could be holding a lantern in front of some corporate headquarters or kowtowing to the Kochs and their other corporate masters. They take their servility seriously and like being associated with wealth. I would put them all over the place at the golf courses.

This is their most appropriate habitat, an environmentally catastrophic and inverted place, unsustainable and dependent on resources from elsewhere. I picture them everywhere at the courses as hazards, follies and yard-art, some hanging from trees.

And half-buried in the ground upside down and so on. There's an element of satire to this, but the white boys will probably be unaware of it since they're already oblivious to how ridiculous they look padding along the fairways in their polyester shorts and such.

There they fecklessly whack their little balls around. May the gods of waste and impotence bless them and keep them from harm. Their days are numbered anyway. The next generation is poised to inherit a severely compromised and debilitated society.

Thanks to those white boys, but the new generation doesn't even understand the old values well enough to reject them. The white boys have lost. Their racism and homophobia and religious intolerance are incomprehensible to the young people. 

Bon Voyage, white boys. We watch in sadness and disbelief as you sail over the horizon into oblivion, never having learned to what degree your values are being abandoned. And is it any wonder you have failed, since everyone else is still cleaning up your mess?

Amazonian

The most interesting aspect to me of some of the newer work being done on American slavery, such as Edward Baptist's, is not in how it shows that slavery got the entire American economy off the ground but in how much working at an Amazon warehouse resembles that slavery. Slavery had to make sense within a limited context or it wouldn't have been used. The problem was the context. 

The model for me has always been sports, in relation to competition. You have extremely rational, reasonable and well-enforced rules within which participants can behave all the more aggressively because the rules protect the larger system and ensure that the competition can continue on to the overall benefit of everyone indefinitely. This is the brilliance of having a good set of rules. 

Which is to say regulation. Regulations protect everyone. A system that doesn't work for all of the enfranchisees is barbarism and is inherently unstable. Why should the people being unfairly used continue to acquiesce to the system? They won't. They have to be kept down somehow, through force or some other means. As for the context you look at extent and sustainability.

Is everyone included in some way and is the system stable over time? I think these are exactly the things the American system is designed for, breadth and stability. It isn't designed for efficiency. Hell, no. Tyranny is efficient. Monarchy is efficient. Any kind of totalitarianism is more efficient than Democracy, in the short run, so suck it up, I say to those haranguing on about efficiency. 

You can't blame nutballs like Bezos. The problem is imbedded in the system itself. Bezos just plays the system well. The system is the context and the context is corrupt. It serves only a minority, a small percentage of the population, and even them only in the short-term so the system must be recalibrated and returned to factory settings, meaning the letter and spirit of the law.

This is not the Amazonian rainforest, our civilization and economy. It wasn't intended to be a jungle. We're supposed to be better than that. Let's start behaving as though we are.

Sunday, February 8, 2015

The Invisible Hand

has a whip in it. It's the hand of servitude.

Googled

Only Google remembered my birthday, but we're like that (picture a hand held as in a victory sign but with the fingers tight together).

Ship of Fools

The first step in resisting the crazy stuff coming out of the Middle East is not to embrace the tribalism which fuels it. Oh, wait, too late, the Republicans have already done just that and accepted the battle on tribal terms, the battle that wasn't a battle before then, so it's open season on America now. 

Another great job of running things, thanks to some imbeciles from Texas and elsewhere. Are they all on peyote? Someone look into that. I called one of their think tanks, CANNON FODDER, to question them but they were in a meeting with the arms manufacturers who fund them and couldn't comment. 

Friday, February 6, 2015

Thom Tillis Wipes His Ass

You read it here, folks. I knew Thom Tillis would make us proud. See my post on that. Now he's wiping his ass in Washington and serving up a heaping helping of Republican reform, without having washed his hands. So, if it smells funny or makes you sick, don't blame me.

I didn't vote for him. He's North Carolina's new Jesse Helms, a deregulatory doofus and disgrace, so hold your noses and hope for the best. Thom Tillis is taking America from bathroom to the hallowed halls and beyond. And be sure, if you visit Washington, to take some disinfectant.

If you don't know what I'm talking about google "tillis, bathroom" and all we be clear. It will make you glad not to be a North Carolinian, if you're aren't, and ashamed if you are. And may all of America wise up and feel the shame of our nutball, Republican government in Washington.

A Fiasco to Remember

Thank God I usually sleep well, because I now wake up to the nightmare of witnessing the work of the new Republican majorities, a lot to handle. About a year and a half ago I stopped listening to NPR in the morning because I couldn't stand hearing about all the evil-doing.

Now I may have to give up print journalism. I can't take it anymore. After thirty years of failed Republican economic and social policies they continue to push for the same stuff. How can this happen? We witness with horror. You cut taxes and you don't reduce overall spending:

Deficits skyrocket. You deregulate everything: Financial markets go berserk and take the world economy down. You get on your knees before big business and they want cheap labor: Bye-bye jobs, bye-bye happiness. I've had enough of instant forgetting.

How about some accountability?

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Cannonball

My brother has said that he thinks that he has made only about three real decisions in his life, and those probably badly, and then been a "projectile" the rest of the time. A whole bunch of issues are imbedded in his reflection, those coming to mind firstly for me being autonomy, self-determination and personal responsibility. But in making the observation in the first place he has shown how free he is by questioning his own autonomy. 

And showing that he has a sense of humor about himself, reimagined as the human existential cannonball, which is funny to me in a sad way because we all know the feeling of stepping back from our immersion in everyday life and seeing the pettiness and absurdity of our existence, that naturally narrowed field of vision and involvement in the animal reality of our daily routines. However, "we all know" may be an overstatement.

Not everyone questions themselves. It's a good sign if you can. And it's a real sign of a lack of autonomy if you can't, an indication that compulsion is at work, so it's a paradox, that people who can see just how limited their freedom is are the most free. And it shows how incredibly important it is to be able to laugh at yourself, as an expression of human limitation. If you think you aren't limited you really are nuts. Self-importance is nihilism. 

A refuge for the unrighteous, since the single thing we should be most familiar with in life is our own limitation. It's the most objectively subjective truth there is. Behold yourself with bemusement. The denial of human limitation is the denial of reality and our humanity, so it's all about how you fly. Tell me, did you picture my brother with a smile on his face? With maybe a shrug, as he speeds through the air to his inevitable end.

That may be the best that we can do, the most that we can hope for in life, some style points along the way. We could, you know, maybe hold hands and support one another, in our collective flight. Take care of each other, in so much as we can. I'm all for that.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Left Behind

It's so odd how America's relationship to Europe and the other places that contributed to its founding and colonization has been reversed. We are now the intolerant ones. All those failed political, economic, social and religious precepts that originated elsewhere now exist in purer and more primitive forms in the United States, and it makes you want to get away. 

The stuff that people fled from to come to America is now America's métier, but it's worse here because it represents a betrayal of our traditions and is illegal. England was proud to be an empire and they conceitedly thought they could only improve a country by invading it. We were a product of that, rebelled against it, and defined ourselves in opposition to it. 

So there's an element of denial on top of the illegality which makes it worse and more perverse. We can't admit to ourselves what we're doing, so there's no way to bring it honestly within the system and to try to do it well, to the extent that something indefensible can be done well. On that high note I'm off to work, with the unhelpful realization of how messed up we are.


Monday, February 2, 2015

Born Fighting for the Wrong Side: the Confederacy of Dumbasses

Jim Webb is running for president or at least sniffing around in that direction. I think he's okay but his Scots-Irish chauvinism worries me. This group he extols is more belligerent, backward, bigoted and servile than any other American subgroup. 

I don't doubt that Webb is personally above this but the current status quo, in which the Scots-Irish pseudo-southern cabal has leveraged its way into political dominance, must go. We have had a quiet coup in America, with bigots and dumbasses now in charge. 

And the Scots-Irish have no history of political involvement other than in minority rule and exploitation, first in Northern Ireland and then in America. They were the core of the Confederacy more so than any other group and make undeniably great cannon fodder.

They're wonderful to have around when you need stupid people to die in a hopeless, immoral war, but they have turned America into this, another doomed empire and lost cause. This was not supposed to be our destiny. Webb should run for vice-president instead. 

Just declare for that, I mean, and set a cool precedent by acknowledging his appropriate role, as an underling to a Democratic or even Republican president. He can then carry on in his tribe's tradition of unreasoning devotion to a cause irrespective of is merit.

But we need someone in charge who can reinvent America as it was intended to be, a nation of independent people who own their own government and understand that disenfranchising anyone else is the first step in seeing yourself disenfranchised. 

Sunday, February 1, 2015

The Order of the Goiter

Since America has made the choice for nobility and a class society we must have appropriate honors. I nominate George H. W. Bush, as the first in what I hope will be a long line of honorees, to the Order of the Goiter. In addition he will be the president of the society, the Head High Protuberance, until he dies, which will probably be soon.

Then one of the sons will take over, blood and succession and a male heir being important things to the nobility. Competence of course is not a factor among the heirs and issue since they have the ultra-refined stuff in their veins, by which is transmitted all the goodness of the ages in the genes and in other ways as yet undiscovered by science.