Totum dependeat;

I received the following comment post from Chris Clarke, to a comment of mine i had posted on his Creek Running North blog site:

spyder, I stand in awe. You can work Karl Rove into a discussion of anything.

Now i got to ruminating on this with regards to what i had said, what Chris has said, what i was feeling about the American Soul and what Chris has been feeling about his soul. For those who don't know, Chris has spent the best part of the last six months or so in deep grief over his beloved dog Zeke, first as Zeke got sicker and sicker, and then through the horrible choices of putting him down, and then lost for a while in the despair and bowels of grief over his closest friend's death. Indeed nearly 85% of all of Chris's post on the Creek in the last six months have been about Zeke, filled with Zeke, lamenting Zeke, including several mentions in the past week.

So perhaps my mentioning of Karl Rove has an analog. Karl is the hideous malignant tumor on the spiritual soul of the this nation. He is getting more and more enlarged, more and more dangerous with his power, and his control over this nation. If we do not interdict quickly and effectively (and very soon) this cancer known as Karl will devour this nation, this American Soul. It has already poisoned so much of our body politic, and has matasticized throughout the core structures of the Federal government. Rove is the AID's virus of cancers, hiding as pieces of his tendrils are cutout/cutoff, always able to avoid even the merest taint of contact with attempts to remove him and his disease. Karl is the death of this nation.

And for that i grieve, deeply and passionately. I grieve more for the American Soul than Chris does for his dog. I love this country, i love: its people, its incredible natural beauty unlike that of any other continent on the Earth, its music and cultural vitality, its remaining indigenous populations, its specialness and uniqueness of development, its never ceasing to amazeness. But it is dying at its core. It is spiralling into a pathology that can only lead to death. I grieve for all of the generations of children across the Earth who have, through media, been exposed to the virus that is killing this country: the one party corporate fascist rule of the neo-feudal lords of capital, hell bent on killing America and pillaging the Earth. I am horrified that i feel this way, and realize that i will never not see that happening for the rest of my life.

So yes Chris, i do seem to mention it all the time. Think of me as someone like yourself, grieving ever too deeply for a lost loved one.

Frumpy: "Look at me, I am stupid"

When the first three paragraphs include an outright lie, a strawman deception, a heroic call to kill, and it comes out of the mouths of the American Enterprise Institute, you know you are dealing with serious and dangerous idiocy. It is either that, or David Frum is laying claim to his street cred as a replacement for Tony Snow in the White House. I can hear the following read more like: "Hey Karl, pick me pick me; i am just as evil and deceiptful as Ari, Scotty, Tony, and Perini!"

"This war is lost." No, that was not said by some angry protester, not by some gloating terrorist, but by the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, Harry Reid, in remarks to journalists Thursday.
That's the same Harry Reid who voted only three months ago to confirm General David Petraeus as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
Gen. Petraeus appeared before the Senate--Reid's Senate--to describe a new strategy in Iraq, backed by almost 28,000 additional US troops. Petraeus detailed his plans and warned he would need at least six months to achieve success. Reid voted to give him that chance. So did 80 other senators: Petraeus was confirmed 81-0.

Clearly that was not what Harry Reid told the President of the United States. But these folks have never yet bothered to be honest, to report facts, or to even bother to appear to be truthy. No their biggest and most zealous concerns are to spew out volumes and reams of propaganda, hoping some might stick to the inner vacuum walls of their remaining constituents, the complete and other brainless who have no capacity to tell the difference and will do as they are told. I won't even bother fisking this, given that this has been done for nearly a week now, each time some lying scum is told by Rove to push the story. I am still not sure how a vote for a confirmation equals a vote for war or the surge, but then again, we are dealing with the AEI, a branch of the Cheney/Rove machine, more properly called the Amercian Empire Instrumentality.

That AEI would respond to the puppet strings and put out yet another column attacking Reid, attacking Democrats, and blithely claiming the war is militarily winnable (in the face of their own board members saying otherwise: Kissinger et al), is not surprising. It is most revealing. The bosses are frustrated that they cannot sway the people to accept more killing and maiming of US citizens for the protection and accumulation of wealth by the very rich. The only people who directly benefit from more war are the war makers and the energy companies. It is that simple. Each and every time you hear a voice call for war, they are protecting the profit of their handlers. Frum is just another marionette in the throes of deep passionate love for Karl.

Hi, i'm George Will and i'm a fruking idjiot..

George you ignorant pompous bald-headed corporate ho! Is it possible you could get anymore blatantly obvious about your desperate need for corporate cash donations??? Do you really need that $10K from Exxon to support that domineering chubby bitch of a wife??? What does what i say have to do with anything?? Well let's use your column as an example of puffy nothingness skewed as propaganda for corporate overlords.

"Ben & Jerry's ice cream might be even more sinister: A gallon of it requires electricity-guzzling refrigeration, and 4 gallons of milk produced by cows that simultaneously produce 8 gallons of manure and flatulence with 8 gallons of methane. The cows do this while consuming lots of grain and hay, which are cultivated by using tractor fuel, chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, and transported by fuel-consuming trains and trucks."

Your self-imposed ignorance is commendable, in that your readers are supposed to assume that you have some degree of intellect. Clearly you are suggesting that you know nothing about the products that B&J produce, that you are completely void of capacity to evaluate even the most basic terms of the greening of businesses and the processes of sustainability, and you don't give a rat's ass about saying anything other than that which will generate the largest cash contribution from your corporate neo-feudal lords. But, as you so well model, i digress.

Suggestion: read up on organic farming, so that you realize that milk can and is produced in Vermont organically. First, this means none of those "cides" you list are used. Second, reasonable and intelligent farming practices have been in place in Vermont, and recommended by B&J, for many years, and among these are the use of non-till drill grain growing and recycled compostible animal waste products. Transporting is an issue, and most of us who really do love our B&J prefer to purchase locally-created products, that are every bit as good but with less costs for transportation and storage. These products, like B&J, use post-consumer recycled paper packaging, 100% recycleable PETE 1 seals, non-toxic and non-hazardous inks, and locally produced ingredients. All of this is a boon to the economy but that obviously would never be your point??

Further, unlike your pompous pimply butt, we use alternative sources of energy and power generation, none of which negatively impacts the Earth's atmosphere--but certainly requires increased funding. Oh damn, sorry i mentioned the improved economic benefits again; i really didn't mean to. And last but not least, B&J and other similar local products are just that: locally manufactured products. This means we don't import manufactured goods and processes from slave labor countries to which most of your corporate overseers have shipped all of the means and labor of production. Once i again i dare to mention the improved economic offsets from greening sustainable life practices. Damn it George. Get off the toilet.

more on our impending economic collapse

Here for now i will just mention the development of the legal canon entwined with capitalism. When i was barely a teen (1959) my father (the rocket scientist who tried his damnedest to turn his children into good little randian objectivists; he got 2 out of 3 but not me) said that if i learned nothing about economics, i needed to understand that for capitalism to survive (but not thrive) it required across the board growth of no less than 2%, and that wasn’t taking into account the growth of population.

He, with surprising patience unusual given his common demeanor, explained how each little chunk of a dollar was taken out by this or that strand of the system:

• ~this bit for public infrastructure that goes to private corporations;
• ~another bit for public education that goes 50/50 to people and corporations who are contracted to provide the materials, buildings, etc.;
• ~this bit over here goes to public safety services and the corporate contracts that facilitate those systems;
• ~a chunk goes to corporations for supplying the essential and basic needs of living~ food, water, sewage, trash removal, vehicles, energy, etc.;
• ~another chunk gets snipped off as savings accounts to increase the financial capabilities of corporations to further develop the system;
• ~and so forth and so on.

His point was quite simple, if you only have so much of the dollar, then none of these systems grow. If they don’t grow, they end up having to cannibalize one another in order to exert their need for their 2% to survive. What we have, he said, is a nationwide set of laws and codes that protect and facilitate a schema in which no one entity is freed from its pursuit to increase its profitability. Those corporations that service governments (and ultimately every single dollar of tax revenue makes its way to corporations either through contracts for services or from purchases by employees) pressure governments to grow; seen most dramatically in the desperation of state and local govenments to increase their property and sales tax populations. Those corporations that provide essential needs pressure governments to free up salaries and other funding (to those other corporations) so that more can be spent on the needs (and presently huge sums need be freed up for the senseless yet necessary waste of consumer discretionary spending). And so this goes on.

Should any one aspect of this schema start to fall behind (think your little corner market or other family-owned business) it must be removed as one would remove a cancer. It becomes a drain on the profits of others. Problems lie when large corporations discover that they have extended themselves well beyond needing that 2% (and for the BAT sake of it all, churches are financial corporations who have a desperate need for cash all the time–10% tithe my ass), and they then layoff employees or close up shop altogether. The waves of this shut down smash down first against the local infrastructure and companies; loss of tax revenues deflate the local economy which loses its carrying capacity to hold other jobs and services, and so forth. And i am not even going to mention (well this is a mention) the defrauding of people by large corporations. My dad’s overall point, to a 13 years old, was that i needed to look for a job that would be needed in the long run; one that would not experience wholesale cutbacks or layoffs. {My brother and sister always took his advice. Me, i preferred to study religion and philosophy.}

Governmental systems throughout the US are fighting against this loss of revenue. It matters because that revenue goes to corporations to keep them viable. If we cut this or that govenment service, especially employees and resource materials, we are removing funds from the community’s businesses and corporations. Citicorp announced a month ago that it was laying off up to 15000; today it announces it is buying a Taipei Bank?? Go figure how that impacts US communities. The other pressing issue can be summarized by Coke/Pepsi (never one to promote one against the other) and Levis. The US officially exports Coke and Levis (and thousands upon thousands of other products), but the US does not manufacture these products for export. In fact, the US imports much of the materials and resources for these products (we actual import Levis). No, we export ideas, licenses, copyrights, patents. How long can the exporting of intellectual property be supported by intellectual production (mining the minds of the children to the very end)??

Blogging Against Theocracy--cross post..

the following is cross-posted at the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Party Now website. Blogging Against Theocracy or BATshit protection is very important, do it!

Give me cognitive liberty and give me my freedom

For more than a decade, I have been a proponent, member, supporter, contributor, advocate, and activist for various groups including MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), and CCLE (Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics). At the core of my participation and activities has been my deeply held conviction that human beings share one absolute and essential core liberty: the freedom to think for themselves. Enlightenment philosophers, the “Founding Fathers” of the US, hell even Maslow—all recognized and acknowledged that the one constant in the expression of all human rights and liberties is cognitive freedom.

Among the various historical attacks upon cognitive liberty has been the repression of, and coercive violence against, freethinking by religious authorities. If the Spanish Inquisition doesn’t pop into your head, or the Taliban, then I suppose you are blissfully unaware of exemplars of these sorts of perpetrations and crimes against humanity. Religious leaders in the United States in the latter half of the 1800’s were able to successfully lobby Congress to pass laws prohibiting American Indians from celebrating and participating in their own religious activities. And so it goes on, and on.

Though I am not intentionally channeling Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (both for whom I have deep respect), I propose that we do a grave injustice to the minds of our forthcoming seven generations when we allow, indeed insist, that religious leaders in the US demand that they be free to inculcate their theocratic beliefs in the minds of the children.

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
The civilized behavioral notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society
Building to the new world order
We’re expected to carry the stone

Emperors and the feeding Class
Human beings being used up fast
The miners keep on mining
Intelligence is the mother-load
Imagination as an energy source
In this predators way of dining

Defining how and what we think
As we’re led to the way to believe
Conditioned reaction
We call thought
Our reality rides
In how we perceive

In the ways of being lost and alone
Who runs from their doubt and fear
In the mask of everything’s normal
Who’s not feeling or seeing too clear

Could be we’re being programmed
Anyway our spirit bleeds
All over our lives.
Our lives become fuel
For predator needs

Hidden in the beauties of Babylon
The civilized behavioral notoriety
The more evil the empire
The more paranoid the society

This John Trudell poem is my daily reminder that we cannot, must not, continue to allow our children’s minds to be mined for power and energy, especially by religions. It is the propagation and perpetuation of sectarian religious ideologies and creeds that are being mined from the minds of our nation’s children. They are fodder in the future battles of theocratically-driven agents whose sole duty and purpose is to expand their congregational flocks to control the destiny and future of the planet. Convert the children and they will become the soldiers of the future wars, guided not by service to their inalienable rights, but rather by their sworn allegiance to religious authority.

Do I really need to mention the Academy Award nominee documentary: JESUS CAMP? Good lordy, the promo enough should freak you out:

At a summer camp for Evangelical Christians, children have their faith reinforced and their ideology honed by the camp’s founder, Becky Fischer, whose stated objective is to “take back America for Christ.” Under Fischer’s tutelage, the children speak in tongues and pray for the appointment of pro-life Supreme Court justices.

This is just one particularly vulgar and obscene perversity in the assault on the minds of the children. It is not, unfortunately, an isolated case. Legal teams encourage religiously misguided youth to stage actions to establish claims against local and regional governmental agencies, particularly schools, hoping to erect protocols and precedents reinforcing the theocratic intentionality. Pastors and corporate ministers shout from their pulpits (bully ones on broadcast and cable networks) inflaming the faithful to push their children towards belief in some rapturous salvation, thereby increasing the willingness of the children to commit acts of violence and hideously-vile intolerance.

The children are being mined. We are allowing these sub-humans to drill into their minds and extract political, social, and economic power from them. And as with any other mining process, we create the waste and tailings. Children intentionally left behind, labeled with various syndromes and disorders simply because they refuse to be drilled to their spiritual and psychological cores by zealots bent on accumulation of power and wealth. I am pretty sure I read once that that guy Jesus said something about protecting and keeping from harm the children. Well his acolytes are doing a really terrible job at that.

i wonder wonder wonder who: who really cares?

the following material has been cross-posted in this commentary thread at WAAGNFNP

I now, without too much hestitation, paraphrase from three posts that seem to have encouraged others to shoot me with incredible flaming textual arrows. (Disclaimer {in snuggling parentheses} Alas, the views are mine and mine alone, and should not reflect those of any others with whom i may or may not be associated, whether in or out of this specific blogsphere.)

a) Political assassination is an extremely efficient and effective method for enacting substantive political change in the short term. It is so useful that most powerful political forces, corporate security apparati, and others, find themselves drawn to it on a regular basis (our own local law enforcement have been retrained to use head shots rather than center of mass shots to bring down suspected felons). It is my view that such tactics would facilitate necessary and fundamental change in the US, both at the governmental, and at the private corporate level (the Hydra notwithstanding).

b) Ted Kaczynski was a crappy strategist who misused his talents by targeting unimportant individuals, and inflicting (given say the US military in Fallujah, or Afghanistan) minor damage when all is considered. His considerable skill at packaging woulda/coulda/shoulda been better used to interdict at key structural points in the financial and utility stream. Not being specific (yes that might trigger threat alerts wouldn’t it, which would be bad for centrist thinking types), the list of those who charismatically lead organizations that are pathologically dangerous to the soul of America is not long nor obscure.

c) The PDF (you all know the correct acronym, but it automatically triggers one of those special tags leading this thread to “them” who want to violate our constitutional rights) wastes inordinate resources on trivialities; they could much more impactfully have chosen targets that would make profound substantial differences. Car dealerships, housing developments, a few miscellaneous pieces of equipment—these just don’t carry the message, nor the import, of something deeper and more direct. Wayback in my Mr. Peabody machine when i was in the Navy (late 1960’s deskjob, as i was already considered a troublemaker–hey the Navy paid for me to go to the Monterey Pop Festival, not my fault i ran into that Senator’s son there), i did a little work on developing plans to protect US infrastructure from internal attacks. To this day, the systems are ever more vulnerable to casual malicious and vandalizing attacks, and not at all secure from potentially deeper, more-focussed threats.

My motto for the last 40 years has been: “Moderation in the extremes of excess is intelligent!” Of course that had more to do with the sixties than anything else, but over time it lent itself to ever more expanded realms and connections in my life.

That said, my point regarding political violence is that unless one is prepared to do it, mentally and physically, they will not be prepared when the police states manifest there own version (and they do so all the time as we are doing so as a nation against other nations). Those on the other side usually end up in cattle cars heading down the tracks to the next reservation. State-sanctioned political violence is still political and violent, and considerably more deadly. The US has historically been a nation bent on using political violence to achieve its agendas, especially quests for territory and resources. Kent State and Jackson State were not anomolies in the long run of the use of physical force to instill coercive order. Corporate use of violence is also a mainstay of this great nation; we need only revisit attacks on mine workers and their families for that one (and too many other such events sadly said). I always keep this short list handy to remind me of just how often the tactic of political assassination is used. Perhaps knowing so many families of disappeared in Chile and Argentina has twisted my thinking.

The US is the number one purveyor of physical violence on the planet, we sell more weapons to more people than the next 12 nations combined (and that ratio is becoming even more unbalanced); large purchasers include China, Egypt, and India. The far right, right, and most of the center, seem to have no problem with this. Indeed, they embrace it as part and parcel of their version of what is patriotic and righteous. From where they view, it is great for business, great for the economy, and great for the country.

It has always been the nature of the advocates for liberal democracy and human rights (the left) to oppose this. The essential problem in opposition is that the right has no problem using weapons to defend their use of weapons. Most of the center and most of the left refuses to do so. As a population, this country is excessively innured to violence; witness MSM entertainment programming that celebrates it. That in and of itself seems to me to be a form of political violence.

Indeed the left tolerates all manner of coercive threats and behaviors, particularly in our public education environments and in our law enforcement/criminal justice system. When i moved away from LA in the late 1970’s, my friends and i already understood that the streets of that cosmomegapolis were merely a battleground between gangs, some in blue or khaki uniforms, others in red or blue bandanas. It would not be too far off the mark to suggest that had the gangs in uniform acted less like gangs and more like civil servants, less gangs would have been developed. Recent FBI and DHS studies say LA County has more gangs per square mile than any other metropolis.

I don’t think there is any real answer at the moment. It will come down to the battles over water, safe havens from climate disrupted environments, access to food and energy, and the struggle to make it to another day. And all that will be happening in the US, as it will across the planet.