Thursday, March 31, 2011

Nebs Sez

"I've had a number of arguments with folks who believe in 'this conspiracy' or 'that cabal'. While I'm quite certain there are various factions who control 'some things', I seriously doubt that any One Faction Controls Everything. The type of personality that engages in such undertakings is always 'seeking more' and there will always be infighting among the powerful and Faction A displacing Faction B and so on.

I have begun to strongly suspect that The Hologram, aka Modern Corporate Marketing Culture, has become so seamless and omniscient that even most of those who ostensibly run the thing are themselves in its thrall and that now no one is really in charge. The beast moves forward under it's own mindless momentum, a Zombie Consumerist Skynet.

And that is a far more terrifying thing than any Vast Evil Conspiracy. With the latter at least someone would be in control."

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Random

~I am enjoying a moment of equipoise. My stomach has settled and I can eat normally without regret. None of my aches and pains are presently drawing my attention. The issues that tend to press in upon my consciousness are quiet for the nonce. And am I writing...

I thought I should acknowledge this moment while it was here. I'm sure it shall move on soon enough. And so it is...

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Joe Bageant, 1946-2011

March 27, 2011

Joe2 After a vibrant life, Joe Bageant died yesterday following a four-month struggle with cancer. He was 64. Joe is survived by his wife, Barbara, his three children, Timothy, Patrick and Elizabeth, and thousands of friends and admirers. He is also survived by his work and ideas.

According to Joe's wishes, he will be cremated. His family will hold a private memorial service.

Random

~I'm an old fart with a number of afflictions, so I down a lotta pills and such. And sometimes me gulliver just says, “Fuck you!”

I woke up feeling fine earlier, but about half way through my banana and a third through my coffee, my guts just flared up. I wound up shitting and puking simultaneously. Ay haz a bukket, so the puke didn't go on the bathroom floor.

I lay down for a bit and then finished the rest of my coffee and banana and had a piece of toast. Then I went back to bed.

I'm kinda wrung out. I am that a lot these days. Got the ol' Existential Dread going on. At least it ain't of the Nameless variety. I know what's drivin' it.

Gonna do my best to chill a day or so, though my fuckin' Brāne tends to be uncooperative in the Chillin' Dept. *sigh*

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Nebs Sez

...I was going to post this as a comment on Are trades unions out to destroy American society?..but it got too big and probably too provocative for its original audience...

"It's “Right Wing crap” because it is a collection of half truths and out right lies labeled with an alarmist headline which has become the standard political battering ram of the Right.

“Are trades unions out to destroy American society?” is a framing statement posing as a question cut from the same cloth as “When did you stop beating your wife?” and is a clear red flag that what follows will be propaganda. To address 'dad29's' comment, “Trades” is added to mentally encompass ALL Unions, which is the true outcome of such Corporate propaganda.

Union members have had National Guard machine guns aimed at them in living memory. But that looks bad to the general public. Better to demonize them, ship their 'overpaying jobs' overseas and let all the evil things Corporations have done slide down the Memory Hole. “Oh, did you see who's on “Dancing With The Stars” tonight?”

In the Capitalist System The Corporation [Capital] and The Union [Labor] are natural enemies. Corporations have always hated Unions because they cut into both their profits and their prerogatives. Unions have always hated Corporations because they tend to use human beings as interchangeable and disposable, which in Capitalism they are.

Over the last thirty years – since the Reagan administration to be precise - The Corporations have been working on rolling back the worker's rights that Unions won; the 40 hour week, overtime, collective bargaining, health benefits, the list goes on. Many of these are considered 'American rights' without any realization of how many Union workers suffered and died to win them.

You realize that some Republican jackass was been making noise that child labor laws are unconstitutional? He got shut up real quick. “For The Children” is still way too valuable a hammer for that bit of the Corporate Mask to drop away. Yet. Besides, there are plenty of exploitable little brown children overseas for such to be needed here. Yet.

As I have said elsewhere, "American mass democracy is already dead. The Corporate State is completing its march to Victory. Then it too will die, drown in its own short sighted stupidity. What will follow? Who can say? But I'll put down 'good money' that the Transition is gonna be a real bitch."

At this point both the Republicans and the Democrats are largely funded by Corporations. The primary difference is that the Republicans have nearly all of the Theocrat Culture Warriors in their ranks to be used as 'shock troops' in their electoral battles. It they who are the most energized by headlines like the above. They are largely older and white and lower middle class/working poor/retired [their REAL angst is 'havin' a nigger in the White House'...and I consider the phrase 'the N Word' even more obscene than the word itself] and feel like they are 'losing their America'.

Well, they ARE losing 'their America'. They have lost The Culture Wars over the last two decades or so – women's reproductive rights and gay rights primarily plus all those 'dark' faces on TV – and they're now mostly acting as 'kamikazes' for The Corporate State in its battle for Total Control. Hence ridiculous bills like the one that outlaws using your income tax rebate to pay for an abortion. Such a bill is DOA, but it 'galvanizes the base'.

So, a Union official says, “We need to destroy JP Morgan Chase.” Of course, the Right will not think of that as a 'political metaphor' like say “Second Amendment solutions,” because the Right DOES mean shooting those it disagrees with; “They're SINNERS and TRAITORS!”

That JP Morgan Chase may actually need to be crushed makes the statement even more volatile, in that the very name evokes the greatest of the Robber Barons, men who used private armies [Pinkertons, the 19th Century Blackwater] and Nation Guard troops to crush their restive workers.

And yes, Wall Street does need to broken. It practices Casino Economics and the last time it came up 'snake eyes' in Sept '08, it destroyed $14 TRILLON in American wealth. Pension funds, private and public, were gutted. Millions of our middle class were broken and entire communities wiped out. 64% of Florida's houses are sitting empty as of last month. Yet even now those criminals still prosper while the rest of us struggle to survive.

You're probably waiting for some paean to the Glories of Socialism to emerge from this. Well, I am not going there. The following are quotes from my own writing on the subject:

“We have tried everything, from monarchies to republics, capitalism to socialism, democracy to dictatorship, and yet we as a species come up the same result every single time: oppression, violence, destruction, and chaos. I say if you want to change the outcome, you have to change the equation.

And the equation is very simple. It can be summed up in four words: “It's A Man's World.”...

...So far, no one has presented a solution that will not be undermined by insistent masculine egotism. Think that through. Conceive of your paradigm and then place it into the world. What is the first obstacle that it encounters? Someones political, economic, and/or theological interest. Examine the fundamentals of that opposing interest. If you are really honest, you'll find threatened masculine ego, individually and collectively.”

“The fact of it is that The Male is primarily driven by his Cock. I know. I have one. It doesn't drive me like it used to when I was young, but much of that hard wired 'the universe revolves around my dick' thinking/feeling is still there...and my brothers are all pretty much the same. Only a number of harsh life experiences have shifted my personality, experiences that are not generally available to most men, or, for that matter, necessarily even survivable.

This drive has worked for us as a species for a long time, though the cost has been high. A brief review of history of history will quickly reveal the nature of that cost. Ramses III. Darius. Alexander. Caesar. Charlemagne. Louis XIV. Napoleon. Lenin. Stalin. Hitler. Mao. Tremendous strides were made, but the body count was huge and hundreds of cities burned.”

“The male is unbalanced by the lost memory of his femaleness, which is also the deep foundation of his castration fears. He strives for control because his ‘becoming male’ in his mother’s womb creates an unquenchable need to ‘become’ something else, but this ultimately only makes him Other and separate from the feminine All of Creation.

The male’s unquenchable need to ‘become’ has created this powerful Patriarchal Civilization which has perpetrated many hideous evils while simultaneously being the source of much Great Good. However, this civilization has become extremely ‘over- balanced’ and the evils at its core threaten to destroy all its Great Good. The obvious solution is to create a new balance.

To create this new balance requires The End of The Male. His present necessity as ‘the depositor of seed’ will soon be over as Patriarchal Science itself creates the tools for women to fertilize each other. Women certainly have the Masculine Energy needed to maintain and nurture the positive fruits of this Patriarchal Civilization, while holding its worst aspects at bay.”

This is the core of my Work and the future I strive toward, which you can glimpse here: http://community.livejournal.com/e_speaks/95113.html

Note this all comes from a large and aggressive white middle class male. Of course, you will violently reject this paradigm...and that's okay; we're the past and reading one's obit is usually not a pleasant thing."

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Budget Crisis Meme

Here's the little meme I've been posting around the intrawebz...

"Simple Solutions To The Budget Crisis:
End two wars of occupation­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­. Leave the Middle East.
Stop fighting the Cold War. Leave Europe.
Stop funding the military power of other nations.
End all military contracts, and return all of those duties to the military itself.
Close Guantanamo and return Cuba's sovereign territory.
Stop subsidizin­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­g the already highly profitable oil industry.
Stop subsidizin­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­g the highly unprofitab­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­l­e corn industry.
Stop paying a fortune to incarcerat­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­e minor, non-violen­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­t drug offenders.
Establish a State Bank for each of the fifty states and have each state treasury deposit ALL state revenues, pension funds, etc 'exclusive­­ly' in their own State Bank.
Establish a national 'buy in' program for Medicare with no age restrictions.
Extend Medicaid to everyone below the poverty line.
Rebuild all of America's infrastruc­­­­­ture from the ground up.
Rebuild American industry here in America itself, by government fiat if necessary.
...and the biggest one, return to the sensible Eisenhower era taxation rate."

Steal and re-post.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

A Response

~Yesterday in this Comm this little missive was posted here. Usually, I ignore these things. Most Americans have no real inner mechanism for dealing with existential crisis, so we respond with a vast burst of Feel Good Charity Porn. I refer to it as such because it is not really about 'those in need'; it is about salving our own feelings of Terror and Guilt.

But this last one pissed me off because it ended with this; “We need to walk our talk, people.” That is a Shaming Statement and as such is decidedly un-Spiritual. Implicit in it as that if you don't cough up something you're not a good person. I ignore that crap all across the Internet, but I won't put up with it here.

And this has nothing to do with my feelings about Japan and the Japanese. I have had great love and affection for them ever since Madam Saito taught me to use chopsticks when I was seven years old. [1959] Barring anyone who is actually Japanese or speaks such, I likely know more of Japan than most in this community.

If any nation can pull itself out from under this catastrophe, it is Japan. Sixty six years ago they started to pull themselves out from under the total wreckage of their Imperial Ambitions and it is only two decades since many were worried they were going to conquer the world.

Unlike the Haitians. Remember them? It's been fourteen months since that 'great outpouring' and yet hundreds of thousands of Haitians still sit in their own wreckage and shit. And there are tens of thousands of former New Orleans residents, some of whom are multi-generational, who have never been able to return to their homes or even their city after five and a half years.

Where are the Urgent Appeals for them? Long gone and long forgotten.

Now of course a few of y'all did the old “Well, what have you done” bullshit. I've been homeless, that's what I've done, nearly two years. And while I was, I did my best to help my fellows, though usually all I could was tell folks where good food and shelter could be found, talk about getting Sober [I'm 16 &1/2 years Sober] and explain how the so-called 'system' worked and how to 'work it'.

These days I live in the boonies with my Blood Sister. We're both on Disability. We rescue kitties and help out our friends – and they us – when we can. We do our best to be Grateful for what we have and give back what we can in the best way we can.

What we do not do is try to shame others into Feel Good Charity Porn. That is both unthinking and un-Spiritual.

As I said, normally I simply let these things pass. I know full well how weak most of my fellow humans are. But that Shaming Statement was not acceptable in this place and required a vigorous response.

Some will understand that and some will not. But that is between you and your own Conscience and Deities. And so it is.....

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Random Lite

~I said on one comment thread that I should start a Trolling Anonymous. That shit IS fucking addictive. And it's all just Avoidance. I really need to be working on The Explanation, not thumpin' chumps on dar intratubes. *sigh*

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Nebs Rejects 'Hope'

~Today's ugly event in Madison does not truly surprise me. And it is why I have been very tentative in my 'enthusiasm' regard Wisconsin etc. I know perfectly well what these evil sons-of-bitches – The Corporate State to call the thing by its True Name – are capable of and are prepared to do to get their outcome. And The Corporate State is unified, well funded and controls many of the levers of Power.

The People, as such, stand very little chance against The Corporate State short of violent total revolution and I suspect such is not going to happen, not yet anyway. If it got to that point, The Corporate State would likely throw a few bones to The People until they calmed down and then, after some short interval, they'd begin again.

The People, as such, do not have that capacity. Too diverse. Too divided. Too dependent. The Corporate State will always outlast them and will grind them down over time. Just look at the past three decades.

Therefore, I have to 'reject hope', yet still do my Work and keep maintaining my own peculiar brand of 'hopefulness', all while the social fabric steadily unravels across the entire Republic and The Corporate State tightens its grip both here and around the world.

And I wonder why I some times have trouble sleeping....

Monday, March 7, 2011

Random

~I woke up in an evil mood. I'd been thinking of my last small script attempt to make some kind of product that I could use to push myself as a filmmaker, which led to anger at how my mother had sabotaged the effort because such would enrage my Evil Step Father, whose own film making ambitions were pretty much dead and largely by his own hands. Even the slightest possibility of my getting anywhere in that regard would be violent rebuke to him. So they had to be crushed.

And crushed they were. That was really when the last real spark of my dream to make movies was extinguished. It took years for me to finally admit such, after surviving nearly two years of homelessness. With that perspective, I had gained the strength to admit that my dream was finished.

But I cannot seem to shake the anger. It would be one thing if the Monster that is Hollywood had beaten me. I'd be in good and often noble company in that regard. But to be betrayed so blatantly by my own mother because of her fucking fear? That is an anger I suspect I shall take to my grave.

My dad was in hospital last week. His ticker had a lil hiccup. Being the Drama Queen that I am, I went to Worst Case straight away. He seems okay btw. But he and I have resolved our issues, largely because of his efforts. I merely acknowledged them.

This of course brought up the unresolved issue of my mother. The key is the Evil Step Father. While he lives, I seriously doubt any resolution is possible. I actually have a Google Alert set for his name – he has some fame – waiting to see that he has died. But he's one of those Eastern European sons-of-bitches who outlive everybody. That he's a vital and talented artist only makes his probably lifespan greater.

So, therefore I expect my mother shall also take these unresolved issues to her grave as well. She's diabetic and an active alcoholic, so the prognosis sucks. *sigh*

And fuckin' El Padrasto would likely get some little Asian art girl as a live-in companion within months of her death. He's wanted one of those for years now. That Mumsie is also a violent
alcoholic has precluded such.

Yeah, my Family System is a fucking hoot when it's laid out in black & white like this.

Now I have to work on some Lawfare weapons, but I have zero motivation to do so, even though only some assemble is required at this point. I just want to sleep and watch cop shows. Feh...