A Species of Vanity

We're so vain

We think it's all about us 

Don't we?

Don't we?

Expanding Gases

We're all suckers

Expanding gases

Manifest energy

Without destiny

But maybe free

Emissions in the dark 

Not nocturnal

You dirty mind

What does it mean

Nothingness 

It doesn't compute

Nothing does

I mean

I'm not mean 

Are you

What does it mean

You meanie 

Common Purpose

There are no conspiracies

Only people acting in concert

Out of tune with humanity

But the common purpose unites them against us

They don't need conspiracies

Why assume the risk?

They all know what they want done

Always pushing waiting to find the weakness

We are the weakness 

We're on the same side we're told

We think we are but we're not

They're against us

Really just for themselves

The same thing though

The way it plays out we lose

We're losers

Advice of Counsel

For mere mortals "counsel" means a lawyer. More likely, a friend or colleague. For the elect it means Jesus, so Ted Cruz must have had a meetup with his Savior before he had his coming-out at Liberty Baptist University, where the school mascot should be the BIGOT. 

Did he mean to establish his hopelessness as a candidate for the presidency at that bastion of backwardness and homogeneity? Oh, my God, a "homo" word. They will be horrified. Retroactively, having Jesus as lead defense means you are existentially not-guilty.

Incrimination is impossible with Jesus on your side. You're not guilty by virtue of salvation no matter what. You are right irrespective of conscience or morality, results or intents, mortal or venial sins. Can the saved commit a mortal sin? Are they absolved instantly?

It's all a conundrum to heathen like me, dwellers in imperfection and uncertainty. At least my dog loves me. I'm sure I'm a living insult to creation in Cruz's eyes. I'll regard the Religious Right's salvation defense as mutation of the insanity defense and let it go at that. 

And take care of my dog, the good creature. Cruz's crowd will have to represent Christ in the world. I hope they're right about their salvation. Jesus will be seriously pissed with them if they're not. It would mean an amazing post-mortem reversal of fortune for them.

Yoknapatawpha Country

Years ago, reading Fitzgerald and Faulkner, I thought there were parallels between the Irish Catholic and Southern cultures: defeated peoples whose dreams were invested in the invention of romantic worlds which dulled the humiliation of defeat and ongoing oppression. Their religions were made illegal, Catholicism in the case of the Irish and racism in the case of the South. 

The Irish are credited with being politically savvy because of this. They learned to uphold their beliefs and institutions through clandestine activity, which played out weirdly in the new world, where they were politically astute but heavy handed and insensitive to the possibility that they might oppress people themselves. So now with Southerners in America. They're running everything. 

They're incredibly good at the political thing and oblivious to the harm they do. There's no sense of responsibility at all but extreme cunning in exerting minority control of the political system. Always, in the US and probably everywhere, there have been hard truces won to keep the interests of oligarchs and big money from winning out and screwing everyone and themselves.

So much for that. Big business is running America. This is beyond bad. This is the end. Of everything. Life as we know it in America. It's over. It's not just beyond bad but beyond sad. And we have the political will of white Southerners to thank for it. I hope they're proud of themselves. I liked our country the way it was. Democratic. Strong. Idealistic. Independent. Kind of free.

Down the Up Staircase

America is really getting interesting. I was a student of cultures once and remember wondering, in two different disciplines, how countries with huge momentum could screw things up independently of external pressure and fail quickly. Things got worse: all the arts, government, technology. 

Read the satires of Juvenal or about Athens in 415 and the desecration of the Herms. It wasn't just me. We talked about it openly in class, first in studying economic history and then classical cultures. Most of the European empires sank from their own stupidity, usually by overreaching.

Think how hard it was for the Union to defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War. It looks inevitable now but beating someone into submission on their own turf is hard. Even if an enemy waltzes in they still have to maintain the place, against the will of the inhabitants and their allies.

This is all a country like ours has to do, keep from being conquered. Now try to imagine our defeat. So what are we so afraid of and why are we stirring up trouble everywhere? Bad leadership elected by us. Reelected after they screwed up. Good work is unrecognized and unrewarded.

America has always on balance been an open way up for a whole lot of people. On balance. If you were free to try you could move up. Not any more. We're in a special lockdown and even people who are working their asses off are moving down. This is only disputed in creationist circles.

Disputed because they have caused it, through bad policy, and they know it. The blame will come to rest on them. Why not now, while there may be some chance to reverse the damage and restore goodness? Look at the trends since the 1970's. This is not difficult to figure out, people.

Bad policy has bad consequences so you change it. Even conservatives believe we're going backwards but won't admit that the age of our ascent was all made possible by progressive policies, with progressive taxation and investment in infrastructure, when it's simply true.

By observation. So they argue stridently, as they must, to overwhelm common sense. The ascent occurred over a longish period but, still, the connection with sound, progressive policy is clear. Ted Cruz thinks Republicans win by owning the crazy, by insisting on extreme policy. 

That's his shit. I think progressives win by owning the reality that we built the country, we're the good guys, and that conservative policies are observable failures. We argue the record. I'll argue it. And, by the way, Republicans desecrated the Herms.

Jingo-bells, Jingo-bells...

It must be Christmas all the time at FOX NEWS. I wonder if they ever take down the tree. You live in an alternative reality of invented truth. You make money like crazy and it doesn't matter if you get caught making stuff up. Worst case, if you really screw up, you get the special Republican platinum parachute: you somehow get hugely rewarded for a flameout.

What a cool world. Remember that Miller guy who yelled "he lies" or such at the president? The money poured in on him. The system incentivises insanity. It's this way for the FOX people, like Glenn Beck. It was this way for the neocons. For Bush. For the people who caused the financial collapse. What do you have to do to get fired or demoted or lose money? 

In their world there are no consequences. Not for them. There are for us. 

Otherworldly: You Can Take It With You

The line between life and death isn't a big deal for conservatives, I suppose because their entitlement straddles the divide. Individual salvation is manifest in this world. And there's a national version, according to which the USA is God's chosen country.

Look Back in Anxiety

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"

The anger of the postwar generation has given way to angst--and arthritis--as they get old and pass on. So many are gone already, but their indignation amounted to nothing. Oh, it had a lot of entertainment value, but the puritanical impulse ruined it as it ruins everything because it doesn't mean anything to be angry, but it means something to be angry about something. 

The reaction against the blind acceptance of values, the best spin on the fifties and sixties, degenerated quickly into the blind rejection of values, which is vandalism and meaninglessness, the characteristic work of unevolved adolescent boys, blowing things up only to view the result. Then they realize--you hope--that they can't still have the thing they just exploded.

And that the blowing up of things will eventually make the freedom to blow things up impossible. In the best case the awareness sticks and they grow up. Those who don't should be kept out of positions of power or they will wreck everything, so you wonder what percentage of world leaders live there, in the land of destruction and arbitrary power, the land of the man--DeLay.

Maybe the vandalism is meaningful in a larger context, as it must be to be comprehensible, but the people who were against any kind of authority won out in the sixties. It means something to be against arbitrary authority but not against all authority. Without it there is no peace. Peace is the result of some kind of order and I think the authority should be impersonal and adaptive. 

Not associated with some sect or nation or religion or person. Children should understand that parents are not the authority, for example: that parents themselves submit to an authority deemed good by them and by consensus and expect the kids to submit to some extent as well. If the kids can come up with something better, well, swell, we'll adopt it, subject to approval.

But there are people who are instinctively against authority forever and those who love it whether it's any good or not, the puritanical extremes, where there's no dialectic or interpolation and opportunity for progress and improvement. There are those conservatives who were too frightened by the sixties and retreated into certainty and absolutism, attacking an exotic liberal bogeyman.

We're a progressive country, a tradition worth being conservative about. England had this problem and messed it up, the reality of the British Empire diverging from their ideals and their self-image and resulting in the romanticizing of incredible stupidity. Gandhi saw this and threw it in their faces. We could have used a Ghandi and instead we got Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff.

Who showed an amazing disregard for decency in relation to Native Americans. Now the next generation of nutballs is romanticizing our stupidity. Someone from one of our vassal states needs to wake us up--another Gandhi, perhaps--a brown person from somewhere to call us on our crap and force us into a reckoning with the reality of our exploitation of the world's resources. 

To say nothing of our ambition for world domination. Is it impossible for us to see how our aptly-named predator drones and their use must look to the rest of the world? Even our friends will want to have defenses against us. Otherwise we might incinerate some suspect on their turf because we think it necessary. Our presumption is incredible. We're so like the English.

If you haven't you should see MY BOY JACK and how Rudyard Kipling naively got his son killed in WWI. It's sad as hell. If I could stand it I would bring up the Bush family and make comparisons. In a better world the ghost of Molly Ivins would haunt them all into mental health facilities or at least give them incurable rashes. 

Famous Recipe

Mitch McConnell's famous recipe fried government is scrambling to keep up with the lean and low-fat trend of the Tea Party, so the extra-crispy version we're used to is heading out. All that batter and deep fried bullshit gave us huge deficits and all kinds of sclerosis.

Fat-cat government is way entrenched, though, and they're determined to cut the flab where there isn't much, in the middle and lower income levels, so we may lose some muscle. How far can people be pushed before they realize they're being barbecued? We'll see.

The Second Amendment is crucial to the whole mess. The Right is right about small government, but it includes the military. That's the subtext to the Second Amendment: we were not meant to have a large standing army and huge stocks of war materiel and weaponry.

Farmers with guns, that was the idea, who would defend the country flat-out because they were owners, investors, and wouldn't be screwed with. It put the power and responsibility in the broad base of the population. Those were the days, a faded memory.

Technology changed it all, the righties could reasonably argue, but how does that not apply equally to education and healthcare? Smoke that in your pipe, Mitch, you bitch, and either cough up the money for those as well or start pulling it out of the military, Colonel.

It's Beyond Me

Paul Stookey once, in one of those concerts they rebroadcast on PBS when they beg for money, pointed out how the popular magazines have narrowed their focus. We used to read TIME and LIFE. Then PEOPLE and US. Then SELF. When, I think he asked, would we see the magazine "ME?" We're essentially there. 

It doesn't mean we're evil, just narcissistic. People with a sense of self don't spend all their time looking for themselves, they get on with their lives. They don't define themselves by the house they have or the stuff they own, so all of that keeps its innocence. I love stuff. I love nice things, but the intangibles as well.

Good conversation, a dinner with friends when everything somehow gels and you don't know how, immersive weather--immersive anything, when you lose yourself in some simple experience--and all the rest. Yes, I'm the model. Be like me. Maybe that would work. I don't know, but what if my house burned down? 

I would mourn like hell, mostly for my art, but then I could reinvent myself in a casita somewhere and bag groceries at a high-end food store and flirt with all the single mothers. Okay, grandmothers. Our lost innocence goes beyond an addiction to stuff, though. Somewhere we lost our sense of connectedness.

Very, very bad. In Paul Stookey's observation is the key to our survival, granting it's not exactly a war-cry. Christianity is profound in this, its understanding of the social dimensions of everything. We are a people and part of creation, all interconnected. It really matters.

Squatter's Rights

There's no such thing as a non-squatter. When you look at the origins of species you see that adverse possession is the only kind there is, adverse with respect to other species and peoples and probably God, whose holdings must be vast so maybe he will let us carry on even though we have trashed the squatted property unreasonably. 

Primordial rights don't exist because no one is indiginous anywhere. It's another face of racism to think that a tribe or group has a claim to a space independently of anything. The claim must be adjudicated in the high court of human consensus, meaning we have to make the shit up because it isn't grounded in any law or foundation.

But this is good. It means we are free to do it well, not being enslaved by Martians or wildebeest or bohemians. It's our chance to show the universe what a good instance of creation we are and how a well run planet looks through a kickass telescope or from the bridge of some technologically incomprehensible flying frisbee. 

Wait, no. I just took a burrito break and checked the news and we aren't actually doing so well. We seem to be the galactic equivalent of squabbling slum-scum, awaiting the planetary equivalent of urban renewal to save us from our distress. God help us! I mean it. It's SOS time for spaceship earth. Abandon planet! What a titanic mess.

I wonder sometimes what it feels like to be Ted Cruz or Rand or Mitch or Tom Cotton or one of those guys flying into Washington from their slave states to bomb hell out of it. Does "Tora! Tora! Tora!" ever bubble into consciousness as they begin their final approach to the hated place? They have the advantage. The war is undeclared. 

The attack sneaky. The goal is to make their opponents incapable of defense before they know there is a war. It's adverse possession, squatting, the assertion of power and privilege as the human imperatives, unlawful taking in righteous guise, as they have no claim or deed and are outside the system and inimical to it, a fifth column.

There's a dilemma in consciousness. We can't be animals. Either we're better or worse. It seems that we're worse, spitting in the face of God's gift to us, a glimpse of the power of creation, the ability to evolve within a generation, and we only prove again and again how unworthy, inhumane and incomprehensibly stupid we are. 

Moratorium is the answer. At some point you have to forgive and forget and start over without the baggage of past transgressions and entitlements. It's easier in some cases than others but we continue to go backwards, laying the foundations for a future of increased grievances. Maybe we could get past the Civil War in America.

We think we're so above this stuff and we aren't. The battle now being fought for control in Washington is this: privilege and power against principle and the rule of law. If any government, but especially ours, fails to protect the weak from the powerful it has lost its legitimacy. It's the reason for governments to exist in the first place.

Anything else is at an animal level. We are there now and getting worse, as privilege increases. And Ted Cruz wants to be president. It leaves caring and rational people speechless to admit the possibility. Truly, abandon planet! The impropriety of it is dumbfounding. It is not running a country but the abdication of it. It's giving up.

A Declaration of Interdependence

I think the independence thing is solved. We're plenty independent. Nukes can do that for you. You get respect whether you deserve it or not. We're North Korea but not as crude and kitschy. The next step, if we can get it through our heads, is cooperation. Treating other nations and peoples as equals. I think they might like it. I propose a "Declaration of Interdependence" as follows:

...

Trout Fishing in Mesopotamia: We the People

What could be more American than trout-fishing the Euphrates? The last thing the drum-beating warmongers want is for Americans to suddenly look up from their televisions and cheap food and think: what the hell are we doing? There was never a decision made for us to become a colonial power, to occupy and exploit other lands and peoples.

We did it a little at a time, selling ourselves unthinkingly in small transactions and somewhere we went over the line. The scales tipped and we became a nation characterizable by our inability to stand on our own and take care of ourselves except militarily, what you expect from an exploitative nation. And our creditors could pull the plug on us instantly.

How sad this is. I never bought American exceptionalism. I look at our history and see all kinds of complexity underlying the lies my teachers told me, with varying aspects of culpability and confusion but, man, you really can't know how much you love something until you lose it. I loved the hope and openness and optimism of the old America so much. 

My heart aches indescribably for it. The bogus idealism of the American ruling class sickens me. The thing that plagues us is us. It's not radical Islam or welfare mothers or a loss of values, as it's portrayed, but the abandonment of an authentic, national sense of self. The secessionists and corporate conquistadors have it wrong on rightness.

Imperfection doesn't invalidate your ideals. No one ever lives in the land of platonic forms but ideals need to have some connection with reality or it all ends in compensation, the buying off of inauthenticity with dissimulation and self-righteousness  The platonic form of a sofa is not Sasquatch but a sofa, a sofa which looks like those Africans.

They found the tribe there most closely embodying the original genetic makeup of our species. In photos there are hints of everyone in these people, just as the platonic form of anything is its anythingness. A representative government may be a sorryass representation of the ideal but it should at least be recognizably a representative government. 

It shouldn't look like a Yeti, but ours is a Yeti, failing to embody the minimum identifiable attributes of the thing it is supposed to be. Suddenly, there comes to mind for me the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution. When in the course of events a thing ceases to function as the thing it is supposed to be you do something.

Such as throw it out and replace it or modify it into compliance with the applicable standards, such as "of, by and for the people." The schismatics won't have it. The new puritans don't believe in "we the people," those few exceptionally powerful words declaring us to be an independent group of common purpose and destiny. There's no inclusive "we."

Not for them. They are about exclusion. By poverty, race, bad luck, age, illness or other imperfection. Less for us is more for them, evidently. You can be inside the happy zone one day and outside the next, and to hell with you if you are. They'll make it as hard as possible to get back in. But "we the people" is our American way of being, an essential element of our identity.

Inclusion. I wrote a paper for a class in economic thought in 1982 attacking Milton Friedman on these grounds, that the imperfection of your theories doesn't invalidate theorizing. Those Chicago economists were positivists: fatalists, skeptics and nihilists, really, as opposed to being normative. Standards were too fuzzy for them in the face of efficiency, their grail.

It's not a failure to admit failure but a sign of strength. If an inclusive "we" means owning our imperfections it's good. You can't achieve perfection by walling off anything. It's schizophrenic and unattainable anyway because you unavoidably try to wall off aspects of yourself as you mistakenly see them in other people. What you don't see is the denial and compulsion.

The insanity of purporting perfection. Our strength as Americans has always been realism and practicality and the willingness to act responsibly as a people in the long term interests of everyone. It has defined us and worked. It's crazy to throw it away so, I say, embrace the imperfection and just say no to the horror of perfectionism. 

Pander Puss and the Toe Tappers

Everything is existential for Republicans. It follows from racism. It's the default setting when you refuse to judge people by standards of conduct because you are then left with the need to judge people by arbitrary and invented standards. By their being, that is: what group or clan or country they belong to.

So this is racism and the implications of it are pernicious and systemic. As you judge so shall you be judged, there's the dilemma. Racists are always afraid to be judged as they themselves judge because it's arbitrary and unfair, so it all comes down to dominance and submission and toe-tapping trouble.

Why? Cooperation is inconceivable, a humane society unthinkable, balanced relations unimaginable. Always the question: who is on top? Hence the Republican horror of homosexuality. They can't imagine that domination is not an issue for some people so they unload their crap on bystanders.

Bogey-people. They aren't rational actors in the fear forum. There's legitimate stuff to be had there, on sale: global warming, nuclear annihilation, plagues and invasions. But their world is archetypal and associative. Have you ever been in a relationship with someone and realized that you aren't being seen?

That you are playing a role in a drama that has nothing to do with you? There's arresting, unresolved stuff on their end so they're cluelessly seeking catharsis in their relationship with you. Theater tickets are another option but the primal, repressed nature of their psyches precludes that. 

You will not find them where the tables are set up in the fear markets but in the alleys, byways and bathrooms, trying to toetap their way to self awareness, or kowtowing to Kochs and other such unseemliness, as does Senator Pander Puss himself, their leader in that legislative body.

It's submission on the one end and dominance on the other. They submit to the rich and powerful and try to dominate everyone else. You can't have normal, adult dealings in this situation. Always, just beneath the surface, is this need to force everything into a hierarchy of power relations.

Nobody wins in this scenario. It's arrogance and fear among the powerful and insecurity and fear among the dispossessed, the original lose-lose situation, which humanity seems destined forever to fail to overcome.

Senator Kottonmouth and his Konservative Koalition

Wasn't desegregation fun? Forced busing, the National Guard, violence and protests. This is what the politics of denial gives you. Apply it to the economy: you get the 2008 recession. Apply it to government: gridlock and failure. Apply it to the environment: possibly the end of life as we know it.

The South walked right into its worst fears on race. It would have been so much easier if they had let up on black people incrementally, as they are now being forced to do with Hispanics, who admittedly didn't start out in as deep a hole as blacks. It would have been similar with blacks, I suspect.

A thriving, semi-integrated subculture with all kinds of cool stuff going on, but the whites wouldn't allow it so they put us through a monstrous mess. Now "monstrous mess" may as well be our website. Tom Cotton and his circle will not abide rational, productive, inclusive government and its results.

They simply won't have it and nothing more can be said. They must be defeated or forced busing will look like fun in comparison with the shit they will put us through. I don't see it happening. Tom's adversaries haven't suffered enough to take up the fight. They've never been invaded and conquered.

So they see Tom and Thom and Mitch as curious throwbacks. They are curious throwbacks but ones whose lives are animated by hatred and a grudge. They were wronged. They were raped. Justice must be done. Justice as in lynching: extrajudicial, suppressive and unstoppable as long as they have a say.

White is the New Black

Well, white people, welcome to niggerdom. Racism is never about race but privilege. Race is just a convenient way of enforcing privilege. Very handy to have around, it turns out, if you're determined to live off the fat of the land and the toil of others. The English have it fixed so you know someone's class the instant they utter a word and it persists that way to an amazing extent generationally.

It's really true that all of human civilization is a flash, a nearly instantaneous occurrence of bacterial good fortune. We're the bacteria, a suddenly, exponentially growing pocket of schmutz, exploding in numbers through cultural and environmental largess, a rich growing medium. Maybe God's schmutz, but we evidently have the brains of bacteria when it comes to ensuring our prospects of survival. 

Oh, we'll survive all right but probably in a science fiction wasteland of reduced numbers. Picture us in our Petri dish, squabbling in idiot groups of invented differentiation while our growing medium goes to shit. Even bacteria are programmed with the good sense not to do this. So consciousness, whatever the fuck it is, was wasted on us. In fact it only makes it painful to witness our stupidity.

And racism is nothing but the product of illusion and mental dysfunction. Whatever we do to other people we do to ourselves and, with everything being faster these days in the desperate frenzy of resource consumption, the racists are getting a faceful of their own medicine in blowback. Poorer white people are becoming black, as they vote away their own privilege out of ignorance and spite.

Rope-a-Dope

We're the dope: lumbering, reactive, powerful but slow-footed and encumbered by our lack of understanding and easily enticed into a fight certain to fail. We only know one way to fight. 

And it's not working. So why fight in that way or at all? Think of the generations of boxers representing tough groups of immigrants and the permanent underclass. How are we like that? 

We aren't. Not for a long time. We have grown out of the toughness but we keep fighting which is why we're losing, a pathetic, morally unhinged actor in the world. It's reality versus vanity.

Vanity won. And greed. Our national sense of self betrayed us and failed us. I'm mighty hard on the racists but the whole country went that way at some point by feeling right no matter how we behave.

It's a national identity version of an evangelical salvation experience. We got our cards stamped and we don't think it matters what we do anymore. We were predestined and chosen, it seems.

That's racism. Rightness can be associated with behavior or identity and we're now a huge identity movement, the epitome of "white-is-right," a beefy, tattooed dude with a shaved head. 

Someday we will pay for this, wait and see.

Hangups

"Hangups" is the GOP's new social messaging service. Global warming calling? Nobody home! Hungry children calling? Out to lunch! You get the picture. 

It's already being called a success since it was well enough funded initially to last forever. We're stuck with it. Our only hope is to have a countervailing service.

We're working on it. Anybody want to fund the thing? Donors? Investors? Volunteers? Sadly, money buys anything, so "Hangups" is it for now.... (Dial Tone)...

Philia and Phobia

John Lanchester is absolutely my favorite writer on the kind of thing that he does. His specialty is making recondite financial goings-on intelligible to normal people, New Yorker style, but he doesn't get sucked into term paper mode by the material. The further from term paper mode the better for me.

Which is why I like to read about the arts and book reviews and such, because the writing is usually more open and aggressive and less detached. Fuck detachment. Detachment is an intimation of death. I'll get all I want when I'm dead. Detachment is an illusion and an attempted abdication of our humanity.

To be alive is to be involved and enmeshed in everything and responsible, which is a problem for some people, but it also means you're open to the visceral joy of existence even when you're not eating or having sex or stoned or standing in front of the money cannon when it goes off. These primal things are the crux. 

They're addicting for a reason. They're good. Access to these things is a right of birth, IMHO. Some people try to corral the stuff, or fence us away from it, more plausibly. Don't fence me in, buddy. I want my share of the goods. Lanchester shows how those certain people, financial types, want it all.

To the detriment of everyone, including themselves in the long run, and we're at fault for letting it happen. This is the horror and immorality of class and privilege, when one group gets all the goodies and the others vicariousness, an inverse schadenfreude, enjoying someone else's indulgence, usually with a tinge of envy.

I think this happens because people are programmed for deprivation, the assumption of limitation, and for lives that are a struggle and with death always looming and so on. Who knows. But the resources at our disposal are incomprehensible. The only real issue is distribution. Sharing. Equitableness.

We fail at this even in incredibly localized environments and tend to turn our more physically distant human relations into objects and kill them, presumably freeing up more resources for ourselves or at least preemptively protecting what we have. I believe in equity and sharing, even across species.

And I believe in owning our involvement in life. To take life for granted is sinfulness. You can't prove otherwise, so there. I'm a kind of existentialist universalist libertarian. There's a good article somewhere showing how the American version of libertarianism is bogus. I'll try to find it again and link to it.

Our libertarians are class warriors, the allies and compatriots of the financiers and speculators, but it's our sinfulness in not asserting and insisting on our human rights that is the problem. So read "Cityphilia" and "Cityphobia" by Lanchester and meet the smartest guys in the room.

It's an entire world economy based on the ENRON model and it's scary as hell.

 

Okay, Please Use "Patriotic" in a Sentence. And, Now, "Fiscally Responsible."

This is part of a screening test for political candidates calling themselves conservative, in an attempt to get a handle on some stuff, not meaning to impugn anybody's anything, but you have to wonder what they mean sometimes. 

Freedom=Democracy/Privilege²

Freedom is inversely related to privilege. Privilege is inevitable and not a bad thing in moderation, because the studies show that a person's welfare is somewhat relative, but too much of it is poison, for the same reason, because it causes cultural fragmentation and indifference to the welfare of other people.

The State of Nature

Every year in Black History Month, February, the film footage we see of the race monsters and bigots of the pre-desegregation South depriving other people of their rights seems more current and familiar. Southerners have reasserted their will by extending disenfranchisement, even to themselves. 

It is assumed that the lords and ladies to whom they want to cede power will keep poorer Southerners from having to rub elbows with black people out of principle or gratitude. That's all the poorer folks have ever cared about. They will sell themselves down the river for it if they can't have it otherwise.

The Civil War never ended in the South. In fact it intensified inwardly as the open expression of the secessionist, segregationist and racist drives became more difficult. The libertarian economic theories these new righties adhere to are rooted in a power struggle between lords and kings. 

The Southerners want lords, meaning oligarchs. Neo-conservative libertarians with southern roots, like Rand Paul, associate freedom with hierarchy, social stratification and a very limited franchise, so welcome to DOWNTON ABBEY, and get comfortable with the downstairs group, you working people.

That's where you're heading. So when Rand talks freedom he means his freedom to be assured that rich people remain rich forever no matter what. Think George Bush, Jr. It's a world where no amount of hard work and competence will raise you above a certain level and the privileged can't fail.

Keep thinking Bush, the exemplar. Southerners, recognizing that disenfranchisement can't be marketed and sold as such, rebranded it as the new freedom and individualism, but remember that these people fought against freedom to the death while defending their freedom to do so.

Admittedly this is twisted, but get comfortable with that as well. Consider nullification. Southerners wanted it for themselves but were indignant when Northerners nullified the Fugitive Slave Law by refusing to enforce it. Everything only applies one-way and to a limited group. It's not about country. 

It's about a club, a subset of Americans who have all the power, enjoy all the benefits, and never suffer consequences for anything, and it's because we have black people in America, make no mistake. If we were more like Scandinavia racially we would be more like Scandinavia politically.

Racism is driving it all. It makes Southerners crave lawlessness or, at least, a world in which the only law is power and powerful people can do whatever they want irrespective of anything, a state of nature. It's easier to see this now in our foreign policy, where we kill people at will and with impunity.

But that same way, the brute force, will inevitably be applied at home to lower class people. As for DOWNTON ABBEY, I'm an old-fashioned Irish-Catholic, with no use for bigots and snobs, so I may drive your car or mow your lawn but your daughters are fair game, much as I don't aspire to the manse.

Poorer Southerners will realize too late the elite doesn't care about them at all. They are being used again but they're too mean and stupid to see it, and they will wake up one day in the exact situation they wanted to avoid, being part of an intimate underclass with people of color.

Think EASTENDERS but with way more colored people. Punitive, retrograde religious institutions are the South's last line of defense against interracial intimacy, but these institutions are attempting a takeover of the secular institutions, such as government.

This is the point of the abortion obsession and the rest. It's not about abortion but control and about keeping white girls out of the hands of black men. Interestingly it's now accepted for those girls...

Please Open Attachment

I think I recall that our human operating system came in a folder with some other stuff, such as instructions, including minimum system requirements and a warning against not installing essential updates, and terms of use. Certain people have either deleted these or are ignoring them.

So when some clown shows up on the Senate floor with a snowball to illustrate a point about global warming you don't know where to begin: updates not installed, system requirements not met, security probably breached by notorious beelzebub virus, which means the guy might be a bot.

Under the control of malicious, presumably self-serving outside influences or, possibly, just vandals. The hardware there is almost certainly sloppy and slow and the software many generations out of date: he's probably running the primitive and bug-infested homo 1.3 "stone age," the poor devil.

You have to figure that the unit is incapable of running the current 5.4 "post-modern" version of homo or it would have been installed, so he should be deactivated and retired in order not to cause harm or fall into the hands of hackers intent on using bots to take over the world or get rich or both.