arachnoanarachy spins webs of connection between random online material gleaned from daily scanning of the world wide web. fascism is coming to the USA, it needs to be defeated at all costs. moving the consensual media model from right central to the left requires radical progressive ideas.
The following pretty much sums up the output of the White House this week:
Have some highlights from last Wednesday’s Grover Norquist breakfast meeting: * Tony Snow: “The Iranian people are more pro American than any American university faculty.”
Spinning more war rather than acknowledging that the US is in serious trouble, Bushco moves forward with plans to support an Israeli nuclear strike against Iran. Then, when the protests erupt, they will send troops into US cities, using "non-lethal" weapons to increase fear and vile coercion to oppress and repress dissent and opposition. Finally, they will cancel 2008 elections as the entire US economy goes into the toilet.
Yes i am making this up, sort of. Most serious political critics of Bushco acknowledge that what i suggest is all too entirely possible, and therein lies the tragedy and travesty of Snow's offhand stupid comment. Are we really to believe that the entire 68 million Iranians are loving the US more than the entire US demographic of faculty at this nation's 2500 four year universities and colleges??? Of course not. This is pure bullshit hyperbole, but for what purpose.
The Iranians certainly don't care. US university students and faculty know this is pure falsehood and lies. The vast majority of media reporting understands Snow is fabricating. Yet no one is holding him accountable for why he is doing so. The remark on its face is polarizing and partisan. It reeks of a hideous and vile anti-intellectualism, reducing academics to the status of un-american sub-humans, lesser than even the despicable hezbollah and hamas revolutionary classes of Iran. So why was Tony saying this??
What the fuck happened to the First amendment? I remember when they took down the Fourth, and pretty much raked over the Fifth and Sixth along with the Ninth (can you say no-fly list). I even remember the last couple of campaigns where the clause in the First about peaceable assembly was denuded by the ambiguous and arbitrary reduction of that civil liberty to a small specific zone of a locality only. But I do not remember when they took away my right and liberty to use my speech freely.
Words do not have any power. Words are words, they are not weapons, nor clubs, nor bombs, nor flames, nor good, nor evil. Words are symbols and signs, semioticities awash with use and meanings that are ascribed to both the communicator and communicatee. The responsibility of our Constitution places the burden of protecting our rights and liberties upon those who would choose to deny them or diminsh them. Those that are offended by an utterance (Faggot, for example) do not have the right to stop people from using the word. They have the right to be offended if they so choose, and they have the right to speak out about their offense, but not about the word nor the use of the word. They only have the right to express their own displeasure during the experience of listening or reading the word. This is particularly true when one class of persons feels a certain word "belongs" to them, and can only be used by them, and that others who choose to use their word need to have their rights violated. This is also particularly true for people who rally around their own identity politics placards hosting all sorts of rights demeaning defamation claims against words being uttered by someone not of their particular identity.
Fuck being offended by words, you assholes. Be offended by the war, be offended by the poverty, be offended by the violence, be offended by the lack of basic necessities for healthy and safe survival. But stop behaving like the spoiled rich little children you are about the use of words. Reducing my right to free and unfettered speech, by coercing employers and corporations to punish people who use words that for some carry connotations that seem too much to bear (it is a fucking "word" dipshit), only further increases the depths to which our national police/security state has been made manifest. Give me my liberty back you bastards. How dare you claim words are powerful and dangerous? How dare you impose arbitrary and harsh punishments on people who use words to which you choose to take offense (loss of income, blacklisting, restraints on free trade)? Words are just textual signifiers for the holy shit's sake.
So, fifteen minutes before the idiot monkey spews on about this or that escalation of troops that will lead to thousands of more dying, and inevitably provide Israel to nuke Iran, and Iran to organize massive retaliation for which these new troops will be the defense of the precious oil... i am taking off to see the desert. It is cold here, and getting colder. Minus Celsius is not all that bad, but negative Farenheit temperatures totally suck. I'll be back when it warms up enough to snow or some such thing. And i will do my very best to have no idea whatsoever what that batshit public employee who lives in the big White House has to say.
I was going to make a number of observations about the execution of Saddam and the apologetics and revisionist history of Ford, but better writers have made these points much more succinctly than i. Thus i will try to complete my thoughts on why our economy will be our ruin in the near future. Several post-holiday stories reveal that the overall retail sales were down, and did not even meet the lowered expectations proposed by financial analysts and corporate fiduciary spokespeople. This is not good news, but more than that, it hints at some serious miscalculations by the general population concerning their own well being.
First, we must realize, that no matter how much we all want to feel good about the way we live, our lifestyles are inordinately excessive in terms of planetary resources and the production of streams of human waste products. These wastes are beginning to extract a deadly toll on the planet. The lists are numerous and constantly in the news, and thus i don't need to go into that litany right now. What has been hidden, by our own choosing is the increasing costs of the infrastructure that our way of life requires. Our economy is structured in such a way that currency is exchanged for ever-increasing value (artificially induced) from which is extracted ostensibly miniscule percentages to provide direct development and maintenance of the infrastructure. In toto, we pay a remarkably large percent of our daily value to maintain our system itself, without regard for anything other than that system. This value is transfered directly to corporate accounts and further removed from the cycle as in any hierarchical rentier system.
Every aspect of our lives requires this extraction and capitulation of our own personal value to the system itself. We are paying and paying to just barely maintain that system, at the massive overwhelming personal benefit of a core group of human beings at the top of the hierarchy. When less than 1% of the citizens of the US are extracting and removing value from the other 300 million, each and every single day, we are living in an empire, a top down totalitarian state, mediated and hidden by our own paid for media. Look at everything in your immediate environment, calculate the cost and value of all that matter, how it got to you, how you acquired it, why you chose it, what it does, how it works, and realize that somewhere along the line an incredible stream of taxes, fees, excises, adjustments, etc are taken out and handed over to the corporations.
Our roads alone, upon which each and every one of these material products must travel demonstrate the hellish nightmare that is the economic ruin of our lives and the unsustainable destruction of the earth. How they are created, how they are maintained, how they are funded and paid for, how they are changed and altered--at each step of the process our own personal values are diminished and extracted. And if we simply no longer have any more value to give?? Well, fewer and fewer material resources will be available in the stream. The roads will degrade, the infrastructure that thrives from the use of those roads (food, energy, products, waste removal) will diminish, and the detritus of our failing economy will be expanding literally in our front yards. We cannot expect to continue to have our value extracted from us, mined from our beings in both physical and mental assets, and not become tailings and refuse ourselves. Look at the people of New Orleans. The hundreds of thousands of already poor who are now completely neglected at the expense of a few making whatever remaining efforts to extract the last vestiges of value from them (corporate contracts to provide: substandard housing, commodity foods that are toxic and unhealthy, and grossly mismanaged healthcare). As there becomes fewer and fewer chunks of value to extract from our cities and communities, the infrastructures will collapse.
This has all happened before, many times in human history. Often such precipitous collapses are linked to massive die-offs of people and their livestock. But now we have compounded the problem to such an extent that the causalities of collapse, the failing planetary economy and the inability to safely utilize the remaining available resources, are running smack into the most terrible of all proverbial walls: worldwide environmental collapse. The planet itself is reaching its threshold of sustaining complex lifeforms. Massive species extinctions are occurring at increasingly alarming rates. The list of new pathogens that can eradicate human beings has grown faster than research can fend them off. The death of the oceans is imminent, in terms of pollution, carbon changes, methane releases, and the melting of planetary ice. Dramatic weather and climate extremes will increase, placing even more demands on the artificial infrastructure to adapt, which it will not be capable of doing, given the failing economy.
And what i realize right now is that this isn't even the worst case scenario. NO, that involves that 1% of the population utilizing its remaining capacity to extract value to intentionally destroy wholesale infrastructures to keep for themselves the last resources. Can you say nuclear war???
