Luta y eto... crypts and bloods...

How have we allowed the national debate to be turned into the battle between the crypts and the bloods?? We have red states vs blue states, red vs blue parties, red vs blue candidates. All we need is to add the bandanas and a few hand signals and we have fully reduced this nation to its primal gang war status. This sort of gang differentiation reduces discourse and discussion to the instant 'us vs them' banality, encouraging only the most tasteless vile and vitriol of bar fight mentality among even those who portend to be the non- ignorant.

Are we really just the crypts and bloods?? Are we just a collection of gangs that torment and harrass one another? Are we nothing more than a bunch of violent hoodlums exporting, almost solely, war and belligerance as the token tagging claims to resources as territory?? This must be creating hysterical laughter among the actual members of the red and blue flagged gangs.

While i am at it, Bravo channel had a week of idiot shows based on why it was good to be something that was not good. In essence why it was red to be blue in a sense. And among those strange assignations of symbolic foolishness, was the notion that the second best possible reason to declare one a "red staters"(bloods) was one's love for all things consumer jesus; and the number one reason was "that Elvis was more important than god." Now here is a network, under the onus of NBC/Universal logo which is a subsidiary of GE, saying that Elvis was more important than god in 2005! I wonder if there will be protest? Well, let's see that show was broadcast two or three days ago, and i still haven't read a thing about that comment. Being as old as i am, i was a teen when John Lennon made a similar claim about the Beatles. That remark led to massive international protest, the burning of Beatles records, the banning of songs in the US, the scourge of rock in general as a menace to all that was sanctified by Goldwater conservaties--the progenitors of Bushco. Now it is 40 years later and one of the largest corporations in the world can broadcast a claim that Elvis is more important than God without one whimper of angst or cathartic disbelief. We truly have achieved a brutal insanity in our national affairs.

will wonders never cease and other amens

Part and parcel of the various campaigns being waged to force the US to become a theocratic imposed republic (along the lines of the Roman Empire i would think, if the Christo-fascist vision holds sway) is the tacit support that libertarians afford the conservatives in ridding this nation of those pesky support programs for the desperately poor, the altered abled, and the masses of folks who live in danger of becoming part of the desperately poor. In order for the theocrats to sustain their expansion into all forms of governance, the end of public taxpayer support for aid is singularly important in that it requires those that then need aid to get it solely from faith based charities. Once that is firmly in place, along with parochial voucher education, and other institutionalization of the christo-fascist wing infrastructure, those who choose to not "believe" can more easily be marginalized and removed from the public weal, from the civic society. Thus, when libertarian types argue emphatically for a reduction in such services and programs, they are advocating directly for this shift in the country. They will not be able to have it both ways.

The greatest threat to libertarianism is anarchist, in that the supposed angst about socialism only applies to people with lesser wealth not more. Support exists for the corporate subsidies and tax breaks that further erode the social framework of communities, as well as direct advocation for increasing the presence and size of the police state. Hence anarchists are the last great holders of constitutional liberties among the political spectrum. Eventually chaos will force the issue to the fore, and those who have learned and trained to be independent agents free from the morality of corporate capitalist consumerism as well as any religio-credo constructs will be able to function in a conscious state celebrating their cognitive liberty. That scares the hell out of libertarians as much as all of their conservative brethren. Anarchy is the essence of a fully interconnected social organism of species entwined within an ecosystem of greater and greater complexity. Each operating as an independent agent, whilst fully aware that every action is intricately related to all of existence in each and every moment. The proscribed conscious awareness will only lead to greater autonomy within the forms of total interconnectedness. I breathe in knowing that my air, taken freely and independently with this planet is shared will all life in every sense of the material, the atomic, the sub-atomic, the quantum, the superstring, and the non-material cosmos. How can it be anything other than that. And if each breath is such, then each sip of water and tasting of food, and dream and shit and piss and smile and voice and beat are linked as such as well. I don't need any form of government at all to protect me from BEING.

can you say fascist police state little children??

Today's headlines contain this story??
<>

President Bush said yesterday that he would consider using the military to "effect a quarantine" in the event of an outbreak of pandemic influenza in the United States. Responding to a question during a news conference, Bush also suggested that putting National Guard troops under federal, rather than state, control might be one part of a response to the "catastrophe" of an avian influenza outbreak. The president raised the same idea after Hurricane Katrina, suggesting that he is considering a greater role for the military in natural disasters.

Let's look into our little crystal ball together as we examine today's lead stories, shall we? Bush wants Miers on the court asap, to frame a minimum of a 5/4 majority under the leadership of Roberts to sustain any sort of virtual challenge to his authority as he prepares to unleash the final phases of the theocratic fascist state on the US. Following the construction of the new Iraq, whose security forces are populated by Shia militias performing a thorough removal of all Sunni opposition (killing all Sunni males between the ages of 4 and 60), the Bush administration will use the disruption of energy infrastructure and the continuing endless war on terror as a means to push for abandonment of all environmental regulations. This coupled with a new draft will frame a new resistance among the people which when the various "natural' calamaties come to fore such as the intentional release of the bird and swine flus of asian pedigree, will require the US to militarize and suspend all constitutional rights. The full military police state should be in control under Bushco no later than the Fall of 2006 in time to suspend the general election and maintain the current GOP control of all aspects of the US government. Since the Dem leadership will seek its own protection and survival it will fully support these efforts to privatize every aspect of infrastructure in the country whilst nationalizing every political constituency(counties, cities, regions, states). Then putting "governors" in charge handpicked from the religious zealots, death squads will initiate removal of citizens who are suspected of violating the curfew and quarantine laws eventually leading to larger and larger death camps out in the deserts and great basins depopulated of all other lifeforms.

our national culture sucks bigtime

How do you judge the aesthetics of a nation?? The appropriate philosophical response to that would entail delineation of the various connotations of art, common goodness, common weal, standards of beauty and so forth. But such a response would certainly be remiss if it failed to account for the TV watching habits and choices made by the populace as a whole. This especially important when evaluating the concurrent behaviors of same groups, incorporating their beliefs as surveyed in "reliable" polling, and analyzing their choices of foods and beverages.

In the last couple of weeks there have been some survey polls released that demonstrate just how skewed towards the weird the US population has become. In response to these polls, which clearly were forshadowed by intense focus group inquiries by the MSM, our national broadcast TV programming has moved in the direction to meet and sell more products to these folks. Likewise the release of new health data shows that the bulks of those commercials are more than successful, in that an ever growing(pun intended here) number of our nation's children and their parental units are eating more deep fried fast foods. Yes as we as a nation demonstrate that we believe in space aliens(80%) and in a god's intervention in creating storms to punish this country (48%) and so forth, the people seem to accept that it will not matter what they eat, that they will be protected and cared for through divine intervention rather than human based practical medical reality.

Last week the most popular TV programs included in the top ten two shows that deal with being deserted in a tropical paradise--Lost & Survivor, albeit the one with the higher rating includes the supernatural element. Half the top ten were procedural cop dramasCSI, CSI Miami (more about this lower), WAT(missing person FBI), Cold Case, and Law & Order followed in the top twenty by the other two L & O's and the other CSI and NCIS---technologically hunting down people seems to be very popular esp while a war is going on supposedly to hunt down our enemies. Maybe people need the TV versions because the hunts actually end successfully? Also in the top twenty shows are not one, not two, but yes three medical dramas, one house makeover, the monday NFL game, a psychic medium cop drama(add that to the cop list, too). a bunch of too rich and spoiled women bitches, and one lonely presidential trauma. The numbers of viewers were staggering; on average 50 million people per hour were watching the 6 broadcast channels, and another 80 million or so were watching cable each hour, most of which is either syndicated repeats of the same above shows, sports, all over improvement, comedy, and movies. At least one third of this country actively engaged in the very same sedentary activity at the same time across the country.

What does this say??well what does it mean?? On the positive side, people are intrigued by the puzzles presented in the cop shows, the dilemmas of the lost survivors, and the whims of beautiful bitches. Also on the plus side is the apparent failure of the programmers pursuit of bringing more supernatural angst dramas to the viewers--five new shows this season reveal that people just aren't buying that crap. However, these numbers also mean that the people don't care at all about intelligent literary thought, nor about rational understanding, or believability. The people seem to need to get a daily multi-hour fix of make believe reality, possibly because what they experience in the "real" world is becoming so hideous and insane all on its own.

CSI -Miami certainly describes what i mention above. The main character, horrendously acted in an almost MAD TV parody of himself, seems to rather have been cast as Superman or Batman. He cannot speak in more than five words all with very short syllables(yes the people seem to like that in their president as well), cannot delegate responsibility to anyone else, controls every facet of the procedures(do the viewers even begin to question situations when he is first to break in the door to clear a room, then is followed by fifteen SWAT officers?? or when he disarms bombs without calling bomb squads? ad nauseum), violates nearly every suspects civil rights and liberties, and still manages to not scare children with the most insipid of ruthlessly emoted compassion. The show is clearly watched for its T & A and the supporting cast of rich good looking people all of which further convinces me of the stupidity of our people and the reduction of aesthetics to sexual iconography and fetishization of the "high" life.

Although "quotidian" never really made it as a word on TV shows when it was found in the daily columns, blogs, and commentary of the literati, this year's new favorite term too often used in too many contexts--- schadenfreude--has now been heard on no less than seven broadcast network prime time productions.

a nuda duh factor...

or how the media likes to spin any uptic sort of business news into a positive...the story reads:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. manufacturing activity was surprisingly robust in September as new orders jumped in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while August construction spending rose at a record rate, data released on Monday showed.

The Institute for Supply Management said its monthly indexes of manufacturing activity for September was 59.4, well above average expectations of a drop to 52.0 and the 53.6 level seen in August. However, ISM cautioned that the jump was primarily driven by demand following the hurricane, which devastated the Gulf of Mexico coast at the end of August, and that the impact likely would be temporary. "The flurry of activity and the strength of new orders -- I don't think that is a business cycle issue, that is an event-cycle issue driven by the storm," said Norbert Ore, chair of the ISM business survey committee.

"Surprising" then "expected", but of course this is an accurate representation of reality. But let's see if this holds up across most of the reporting of this number that Bushco will finesse for points as more and more of their own personal nightmares collapse. Isn't it obvious that one of the factors in making manufacturing look really strong in this drive of spending $200 billion of the tax payers money to rebuild large sections of the Gulf coast region, that in fact for more than a decade, the US manufacturing base has been obliterated by offshoring and outsourcing most of the processes to the cheapest labor markets. Combining dramatically increased gas prices with the actual need to rebuild infrastructure requires US based manfacturing. This isn't something too difficult to comprehend; our trade imbalance is so disastrously extreme that were we to actually continue to try to outsource the production we would truly destroy our economy.

Non lo so. Non curo!!!

Mariska Hargitay portrays the most vile written character on TV. It cannot be possible that this role is not specifically tailored and customized to her personality and present being. Thus she is one of the most vile of people.

The character represents everything that is reprehensible of our corporate fascist culture: soulless, the oh so faux compassionate expressions, demeaning dysphemistic denoument, overt and direct bitchiness formulate to project that all victims are to blame for all of their circumstances especially those who are damningly unwilling to rise up and become part of the MS culture zombie parades. If ever there was a personal symbolic referent for all that Barbara Erhenreich finds vile and despicable in her new book BAIT AND SWITCH it is this combined character and actress in this role. Is it any wonder that she is rewarded with Emmy nominations by the very same establishment by which she is used to express their version of the Ned Beatty NETWORK message!!

What makes this more meaningful to me is that i have know that family for more forty years. When her brother Zoltan was nearly eaten by lions at a stupid abusive little hollywood style wild animal park in what is now Agoura/Simi Valley, the family attended the same church with mine, and all were asked to share our prayers and thoughts for them. A few years later i ended up teaching Zoltan while i was at UCLA, and knew both the father and mother from conferences and discussions. The father was part of the Venice bodybuilding community(muscle beach), an area in which i lifeguarded for a while. So Mariska's life is well known to me. As the youngest child, in a family that got much too much attention than it truly deserved, she has become the spoiled little princess and lives up to her role of the preeminent bitch of righteous conservative zealotry. It is simply disgusting.

what non-human species?

it's the end of the world as we know it, but i don't feel so fine...

what the House did today constitutes an unconscienable act of aggression against the earth, when they passed the new bill to essentially end the Endangered Species Act. Of the several particulars of the bill that are beyond heinious, the two with which i have the most trouble are the ones that end science as a discipline and the placing of personal private property of one over the health and welfare of all.

To suggest that a political appointee, with virtually no experience in their department nor in any science other than the economy of political fundraising, will determine what is science and what is not science, is perhaps the most radical of faith based institutionization yet perpetrated on the US. I can see it now, the council of the cabal, meeting in their illuminati chairs hidden in the bowels of the secret pyramid beneath the capitol mall, reviewing the best political machinations for their empire building, deciding just what scientific truth they shall create this day. Waving wands in front of their cloaks they conjur a statement that becomes the law, not just politically and economically, but also for all objective constructs as well.

And the notion that one man's personal property is the absolute determinant of what is valuable about the planet and thus worth saving or not, creates the latest in Randian/Straussian horrors of oligarchic plutocratic fascist edictism. I am John Galt and i get to choose how the world lives or dies, and all in that world are subjects of my dominion. Aint' it grand. All i can say is that i am seriously rooting for the protists, monerans, and fungi to destroy the rest of the plant and animal kingdoms thus ridding the planet of humans for all time to come.

da problem with the trolls of unktehi

on a generally liberal blog i frequent the following comment was made, and from which a debate ensued, fed by conservative trolls who railed against public education essentially from their fundamental belief in racism, classism, and elitism(can we say Randianism). Here is the comment:

How come Bellevue schools are better than Seattle schools, even though Bellevue spends 20% less per student than Seattle?

I read all one hundred comments that followed, and was just as dismayed with the liberals to the extent that not a single poster thought to challenge the context of the initial question at all. The trolls on the other hand ranted and raved about how white upper class education was the hallmark of good citizenship and that it is simply too bad for anyone else, especially the poor and people of color but that is the way it is. The fact that not one person asked the most obvious of all questions is indicative of something in our society that i find hugely frustrating. People no matter who they are, and trolls in particular, would never think to engage in a discussion of particle physics, cosmological theory, molecular bio-chemistry, ethnopharmacology etc. They recognize that unless they are persons focussed in those fields, they should avoid commenting because they acknowledge their own ignorance. Not true with religion or education. Every single person feels absolutely qualified to discuss religion and education issues ad nauseum; they all are magically transformed into experts. Well the above case demonstrates why this is such a huge problem.

How can one school district be better than another school district? Wouldn't it be useful to ask what is meant by the word/term value laden construct symbol "better?" Just what is better about one district than the other? That not one person asked the question immediately presented the group with a shared agreement that this statement is "true" without any degree of ascertaining its veracity or declaring it to be so. A hundred comments all engaged in bitterness and tirades against one another, while never challenging the premise that started it all. All these education "experts" who must KNOW what they know sufficiently to comment and criticize and evaluate material texts based on their own glaringly uninformed opinions. As someone who is actually a professional educator (retired) w/ a Ph.D. in the philosophy of education i do feel comfortable talking about the question. I feel i have sufficient knowledge and experience w/ regard to all of the possible parameters of it. I know what it says and what it intends to mean and how infered within it is a bigotry and zealousness for a partisan political agenda that reeks of increasing ignorance not knowledge. What aggravates me most is that the liberals got sucked into the discussion in the way they did.

As for the question/comment. Better is certainly too loaded of a term to be addressed by any reasonable person but especially by the experts; who of course would never ask such a question in the first place. Do we compare sizeable schools, do we use standardized tests, do we accept that the formulas for compounding the thousands of variables into a set of misleading but manageable quanitifiable function factors---these are but three of the hundreds of questions that deserve to be asked. Should we compare economic factors since the question asked about economics?? Should we engage in disaggregation of the data streams to sort out the various means, medians, ranges for which some highly inaccurate but marginally acknowledgeable criteria may exist?? See isn't it too nuts..

turn turn turn again...

A school I visited three years ago in Columbus, Ohio, was littered with "Help Wanted" signs. Starting in kindergarten, children in the school were being asked to think about the jobs that they might choose when they grew up. In one classroom there was a poster that displayed the names of several retail stores: J. C. Penney, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sears, and a few others. "It's like working in a store," a classroom aide explained. "The children are learning to pretend they're cashiers." At another school in the same district, children were encouraged to apply for jobs in their classrooms. Among the job positions open to the children in this school, there was an "Absence Manager" and a "Behavior Chart Manager," a "Form Collector Manager," a "Paper Passer Outer Manager," a "Paper Collecting Manager," a "Paper Returning Manager," an "Exit Ticket Manager," even a "Learning Manager," a "Reading Corner Manager," and a "Score Keeper Manager." I asked the principal if there was a special reason why those two words "management" and "manager" kept popping up throughout the school. "We want every child to be working as a manager while he or she is in this school," the principal explained. "We want to make them understand that, in this country, companies will give you opportunities to work, to prove yourself, no matter what you've done." I wasn't sure what she meant by "no matter what you've done," and asked her if she could explain it. "Even if you have a felony arrest," she said, "we want you to understand that you can be a manager someday."

Now do need to consider that if this is how we want all the children educated then all the children should be educated this way. But of course we only want other children, especially colored children to learn this, and keep the universities open only to the privileged white kids, boys for sure. Consider these two comments:

from Jonathon Kozol's essay in the September Harper's(as is the large quote above):

Admittedly, the economic needs of a society are hound to be reflected to some rational degree within the policies and purposes of public schools. But, even so, there must be something more to life as it is lived by six-year-olds or six-year-olds, or by teenagers, for that matter, than concerns about "successful global competition." Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.

Very few people who are not involved with inner-city schools have any real idea of the extremes to which the mercantile distortion of the purposes and character of education have been taken or how unabashedly proponents of these practices are willing to defend them. The head of a Chicago school, for instance, who was criticized by some for emphasizing rote instruction that, his critics said, was turning children into "robots," found no reason to dispute the charge. "Did you ever stop to think that these robots will never burglarize your home?" he asked, and "will never snatch your pocketbooks. . . . These robots are going to be producing taxes.^"

from my friend Terry Flanagan's email last night(he is retiring this year after 35 years of teaching in the innercity of LA):

I may wait until June. This will be the last year before our school is completely roboticized, thus ending the need for teachers as we know them.

What?! We are roboticizing our educational systems? Well only for the poor and underprivileged which is translated as black and hispanic. We are choosing, as a nation, to destroy our public education system, enslave the masses through their enforced ignorance, and then retain the best and brightest for the white males. The underlying racism and classism can no longer be ignored. As a nation, led by the corporate fascists, we are embarked on a path that promotes a white aristocracy ruling a multi-cultural slave class. No wonder the Federalist Society, encouraging the appointment of one of their own to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, demands that the only interpretation of the Constitution is a pure originalism based on the slave holding, indian killing, property owning, moneyed elites' opinions of self governance under which all else are slaves and powerless without rights.

Mní kte sni yelo

there are days when things don't work well and this is one of them... i had this post ready to, well, post. but it got deleted by some inadvertant power surge.. this so sucks. why why why??? oohohohoh... well i will try later then

damn it all

let's go driving in the car, car.

Let's go driving in an automobile
Let's take a ride in a car.
Listen to the sounds we all can hear
As we travel near and far
Vroom, vr-vroom, vr-vroom
Vroom, vroom, vroom
Beep, be-beep, be-beep, beep
Swish, sw-swish, sw-swish,
Swish, swish, swish
La, la, la, la, la.

So yesterday i go driving in the car; needing to go to Missoula for a meeting and such. Now I-90 between here and Missoula covers a bit more than 200 miles most of which transcects the Rocky Mountains through the panhandle of Idaho and the eerily strange Clark Fork River canyon(strange because as you tend to perceive yourself driving downhill to Missoula you are in fact driving up the river flow). Much of the road passes through a number of small mining towns surrounded by the usual assortments of tailings, rusted hulks of equipment, touristy little antique efforts, and the hideous ugliness of partially restored dessimated landscapes. What regrown forests there have been since the 1940's are either burned, being clear cut again, or are too young to be cut. Why i mention this is that we(esp liberal enviro types) all too often overlook the highway itself in our quest to go somewhere to enjoy beautiful vistas and access to natural playlands.

This summer i spent a great deal of time, as usual, driving up and down the pacific coast from one music festival to another, one concert to the next. Usually i had friends or my son along, and we would often comment on the various clearcuts, destruction of habitat, ruination of view sheds, expansive housing and industrial development and so forth. But yesterday i chose to pay particular attention to the road. The interstate and US highway system has consumed more forest and viewshed, destroyed more stream flows and species habitats, killed more species(check a windshield lately) than logging and mining combined. Thousands of squaremiles of north america lays beneath concrete and asphalt and more is being overburdened each day. Next time you drive through a national forest on a highway and remark about the clearcut on the sides, remind your self that were it not for the clear cutting, the bulldozing, the mashing smashing tearing up of the earth creating huge destruction of stream and river habitats, you wouldn't be driving along so happily being able to see the forest in the first place. We not only paved paradise to put up the parking lot, we paved it to get from parking lot to parking lot. We destroyed it to get to it, we ransacked it to walk in it.

an interesting weekend

we are certainly living in some ugly times in this country, and yet, there are such beautiful people out there who seem to be able to glorify and magnify their humanity in the face of such evil. hundreds of thousands of citizens, maybe millions, stood out on saturday against the war in iraq and for the support of human beings. such a protest laid the table for a simpler debate. Are we, as a nation, happily moving forward in the direction of fascism and global military engagement, or are we as a people willing to make the world understand that we know our leadership is the most evil incarnate upon this planet in more than two generations? I give but one small example. Late news friday(outside the ability of the MSM to catch the story) reports that the Bush administration has decided that the only countries guilty of trafficing in children are those with which the administration wishes to conquer--north korea, iran, cuba---- now among those that Bush chose to claim had made "significant improvement" in their efforts to not kidnap and enslave children are Saudi Arabia, China and... wait for this..... Sudan! How could Sudan have improved its record--well there is that genocidal war going on there. Killing them all certainly qualifies as a means to not enslave and force work on kids or adults. It is sheer audacity and vugarity that this administration holds their own personal economic interests ahead of not only this nation, but the whole of the planet as well---what do the eleven countries that were let off the sanctions for this most evil behavior have in common---can you spell oil and holding US T-bills.

media predicts our future, well it used to:

Just as Margaret Atwood's HANDMAID'S TALE predicted the nightmare that is the creeping theo-fascism that is endemic to the elites of this nation, so clearly seen in the NOLA situation, and even further evidenced in the "camps" that are being set up across this nation to house the colored and impoverished---Paddy Chayefsky wrote the novel/screenplay for the film NETWORK at the height of the Nixon ugliness. Mark Drolette today reminds us all of that one amazing scene that i have found to be so clearly portending this that has come. Combined with the scenes in the original ROLLERBALL, when the corporations that own the various aspects of the earth's infrastructure compete using physical gladitorial slaves, this scene is the identifier of all that is clearly wrong with the US today:

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal -- that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

"You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale!"

Re vera, potas bene

MTV has removed itself even further from the mainstream, dedicating two shows this season to the scions of ostentacious wealth.

Laguna Beach, the real OC is nothing more than a platform for encouraging the masses to act like the super rich spoiled little brats on this show. This snottly beasts with their expensive daily habits think nothing of violating all sorts of CA penal codes recognizing that they have not one shred of risk from being charged with any of the crimes they commit. They further uglify the culture by flashing their complete lack of thrift by travelling excessively from one mansion to another, from one ski resort to another surf resort, from one luxury restaurant to another Ritz hotel. The editors have made sure that not one bit of compassion or concern is shown by any of the players, whilst they jive and groove to the day's potentials, whether they be denigrating friends or cheating on ex's(how this is possible is the only craft that editors and directors seem to employ).

But even worse than LB is Sweet Sixteen. Tracking the short brief history of incredibly spoiled bitches receiving the keys to luxury cars and five star hotel suites from parents with way too much money to spend on utter lunacy, this show attacks the core of adolescent development. In essence the message is that if you aren't one of the wealthiest bitches you are so unworthy in this life that you will not ever be able to enjoy your own rite of passage. It is ironic that they find only those families whose daughters are some of the ugliest freakiest not so sweet sixteens to film anecdotally. I can only assume that this is because the other RB's families know that their kids will violate even more laws than those kids on LB. I can see the shows next year, the parents begging MTV to come film their expenditures of money on parties, amounts that could buy most people new homes, shed on four or eight hours of partying and celebration. "Look at me, look at how much my parents love me, by spending all this money on me!"

It concerns me that the message that these shows provide to the masses is one of how it is just too bad you aren't like this, and whatever you do, do not challenge or question or inquire; just shut up and know your place in the schema of things in the US. As if Katrina never happened we are reminded that only the rich white families will ever be able to sustain their own lifestyles, at the expense of the poor. And where is the middle class in any of these shows. You don't see the doormen, the waiters, the gas station attendents, the maids, the slaves of the gentrified money classes. They are carefully and faithfully excised from these kids lives, while we all know full well, that none of these kids could survive without them.

welfare mentality?? all in the eye of the racists

two different stories today: both highly indicative of the inherent systemic racism of those in the US who perceive people of color inferior to the euro-americans. When so many shout that the problems of african american criminal behavior is part and parcel the result of a socially just welfare system, then they also need to shout that it is that same "welfare" that creates the criminal behaviors of these others. Of course they will never ever do that, because in essence, it is this very sort of behavior that is the bedrock of their own elitist claims to dominance and hierarchical prestige: capitalism at its best!!
From TomPaine.com comes this piece from an essay by Rumpler and Fidis:

Sound public policy dictates that industries should be liable for the toxic contamination they create in the pursuit of profit. And it is hard to believe that the multibillion-dollar oil and chemical companies residing in Cancer Alley, along with their insurers, did not contemplate the risks their facilities and products would pose in a severe hurricane.

However, it is unlikely that American taxpayers will receive one dime of reimbursement from these powerful polluters. When Superfund became law in 1986, the oil and chemical industries persuaded Congress to include two liability loopholes. First, petroleum is exempted from the definition of hazardous waste. Second, “acts of God” constitute an affirmative defense for toxic spills. In exchange, the industry agreed to the imposition of “polluter pays” fees to provide a steady and reliable source of money to pay for toxic cleanups—especially in cases where liability could not be imposed.

Up front, this Faustian bargain with the likes of DuPont and Shell might appear as a reasonable and pragmatic calculation. In hindsight, the public was shortchanged by legislative sleight of hand: While the loopholes were drafted as permanent, the polluter pays provision required reauthorization by Congress.

And that’s where the chemical companies went to work—launching a multi-year PR campaign to smear Superfund and undercut support for polluter pays. In 1995, their efforts paid off; Congress failed to reauthorize the fees. As a result, the Superfund is now officially bankrupt. The Oil Spill Liability fund is expected to be bankrupt by 2009, although costs to clean Katrina oil spills may advance this date. And in case you hadn’t heard, Exxon/Mobil just reported record-breaking profits on the order of $8 billion earnings last quarter.

<>But the injustice does not end there. A combination of wars and tax cuts has left the federal treasury ill-equipped to finance the grand “Marshall Plan for New Orleans” that has been heralded in recent days. With limited resources, the pressure to cut corners will be great. Will cleanup standards be compromised to ensure adequate funding for jobs, food and housing? With no polluter money on the table, the risks of such unconscionable choices become graver by the day.

Hey this isn't looting from the US citizens, it is merely increasing profits and offsetting expenditures to do so. Afterall the ability to bribe congress and be free from criminal sanctions is equal to the amount of dollars expended in such activities versus the perception that a PR campaign can wage on others to cover it up. Look over there, black people looting; do not look at the man behind the curtain. So thousands of children over the next several generations, mostly those of color, but certainly a significant degree of relatively wealthy white ones too, will suffer immeasureable and uncontrollable cancers and infections created by the toxic stews of this horrible mess, without any recourse to funds to help defray the costs of treatment or cleanup. No not looting, just blatant horrendous grand theft evil. But as if that isn't enough, the other story today out of the Independent online edition by Patrick Cockburn, itemizes another great military/industrial corporate engineered theft of billions.

One billion dollars has been plundered from Iraq's defence ministry in one of the largest thefts in history, The Independent can reveal, leaving the country's army to fight a savage insurgency with museum-piece weapons.

The money, intended to train and equip an Iraqi army capable of bringing security to a country shattered by the US-led invasion and prolonged rebellion, was instead siphoned abroad in cash and has disappeared.

"It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history," Ali Allawi, Iraq's Finance Minister, told The Independent.

"Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal."

The carefully planned theft has so weakened the army that it cannot hold Baghdad against insurgent attack without American military support, Iraqi officials say, making it difficult for the US to withdraw its 135,000- strong army from Iraq, as Washington says it wishes to do.

Most of the money was supposedly spent buying arms from Poland and Pakistan. The contracts were peculiar in four ways. According to Mr Allawi, they were awarded without bidding, and were signed with a Baghdad-based company, and not directly with the foreign supplier. The money was paid up front, and, surprisingly for Iraq, it was paid at great speed out of the ministry's account with the Central Bank. Military equipment purchased in Poland included 28-year-old Soviet-made helicopters. The manufacturers said they should have been scrapped after 25 years of service. Armoured cars purchased by Iraq turned out to be so poorly made that even a bullet from an elderly AK-47 machine-gun could penetrate their armour. A shipment of the latest MP5 American machine-guns, at a cost of $3,500 (£1,900) each, consisted in reality of Egyptian copies worth only $200 a gun. Other armoured cars leaked so much oil that they had to be abandoned. A deal was struck to buy 7.62mm machine-gun bullets for 16 cents each, although they should have cost between 4 and 6 cents.

Many Iraqi soldiers and police have died because they were not properly equipped. In Baghdad they often ride in civilian pick-up trucks vulnerable to gunfire, rocket- propelled grenades or roadside bombs. For months even men defusing bombs had no protection against blast because they worked without bullet-proof vests. These were often promised but never turned up.The Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit says in a report to the Iraqi government that US-appointed Iraqi officials in the defence ministry allegedly presided over these dubious transactions.

<>Senior Iraqi officials now say they cannot understand how, if this is so, the disappearance of almost all the military procurement budget could have passed unnoticed by the US military in Baghdad and civilian advisers working in the defence ministry.<> Mr Allawi says a further $500m to $600m has allegedly disappeared from the electricity, transport, interior and other ministries.
The sum missing over an eight-month period in 2004 and 2005 is the equivalent of the $1.8bn that Saddam allegedly received in kick- backs under the UN's oil-for-food programme between 1997 and 2003. The UN was pilloried for not stopping this corruption. The US military is likely to be criticised over the latest scandal because it was far better placed than the UN to monitor corruption.

See, those damn Iraqi Arab colored types, and again the africans(kofi annan), are just despicable criminals bred from all of the social justice programs perpetrated by liberals. Just don't look at the paper and dig too deep into the files or mention how the US based military/industrial complex(think Halliburton/Fluor/Olin/et al) is so apt at removing billions of dollars from systems for which no audits can account. So far the affirmed missing billions just from Iraq alone, under the watchful care of a certain Paul Bremer(now in charge of NOLA cleanup and rebuilding) is $12 billion and climbing. But hey, those Swiss really need the investments in Euros into their accounts as does the Chinese and Russian agencies that are co-sponsoring the syphoning of petroleum supplies and other superior technologies. Stolen billions can provide a great deal of access as do record profits generated from avoiding paying cleanup fees and long term healthcare for those that they choose to destroy.

we are volunteers in the revolution????

so what the hell is Tommy Hilfigger doing selling cheap China made red white and blue clothes using the Jefferson Airplane anthem Volunteers???? If there was one album of the late 60's that focussed the rage and disappointment in the US among those who had imbibed too much Kool-Aid it was Volunteers. Song after song agonizing about the dangers of the destruction of human dignity and planetary health by the government--Dem or Republican, has now been reduced to selling crappily designed clothes on TV. Just for referent:

LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENING OUT IN THE STREETS
GOT A REVOLUTION, GOT TO REVOLUTION
HEY I'M DANCING DOWN THE STREETS
GOT A REVOLUTION, GOT TO REVOLUTION
AIN'T IT AMAZING ALL THE PEOPLE I MEET
GOT A REVOLUTION, GOT TO REVOLUTION

ONE GENERATION GOT OLD
ONE GENERATION GOT SOUL
THIS GENERATION GOT NO DESTINATION TO HOLD
PICK UP THE CRY

HEY NOW IT'S TIME FOR YOU AND ME
GOT A REVOLUTION, GOT TO REVOLUTION
COME ON NOW WE'RE MARCHING TO THE SEA
GOT A REVOLUTION, GOT TO REVOLUTION

WHO WILL TAKE IT FROM YOU
WE WILL AND WHO ARE WE

WE ARE VOLUNTEERS OF AMERIKA

We are talking about revolutionary action against the status quo, against the government, against the corporatists dedicated to destroying the planet and engaged in empire building. And now TH has purchased--using his corporate power in the most imperious of ways--a revolutionary anthem to cheapen the message and suggest that his current line of underwear and excessively overpriced jeans are something other than the piece of crap they are. There is a great and horrible sadness in this.

How deep in debt are we willing to get?

The federal insurer of pensions could find itself responsible for another $11 billion in obligations to workers at Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines, now that the two carriers have filed for bankruptcy. Although neither carrier has said it plans to terminate pensions and turn them over to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., both have indicated they will no longer contribute to their plans - a tactic United Airlines used successfully in July 2004. The future, however, looks grim. The agency may face a shortfall of $86.7 billion during the next 10 years, according to a Congressional Budget Office report released yesterday. This figure estimates the agency will assume $63.4 billion in additional obligations from terminations that will occur over the next decade. The PBGC declined to comment on the report.

So someone should start doing the math on these sorts of public pronouncements. In just the last two weeks alone the fiscal news hasn't been particularly positive. I suspect the MSM is quite content in not making a point of aligning the dollar numbers needed in a spreadsheet that would show just how out of balance our thinking and our economy has become. The CPA in Iraq suspended all reconstruction in that country because they had exhausted the more than $22 billion set aside for 2005. The vast majority of that money went to... private security contractors(who just happen to be lining up in the Gulf region for more of the handouts).. as well as being lost and/or unaccountable in the audits. We are spending around a billion a day on Iraq just to maintain our military presence(again most of that goes to private corporations). Then the nation decides it needs to spend an additional $200 billion on the Gulf Coast this year, and several billions more in the next five years. Now the various financial mismanagements of major corporations are forcing the PBGC to seek nearly a $100 billion to cover the bankrupt insured pensions of a surprisingly large number of citizens who, without this insurance, would further bankrupt the banks and financial institutions. All the while we are in the process, as a nation, of cutting the taxes for the wealthiest financiers (those raking in the dough from the government contracts and from mismanaging funds to their benefits); these tax cuts alone will amount to more than $260 billion a year for at least the next decade and possibly more as the wealth is consolidated between fewer and fewer individuals who take these assets out of the country for safer keeping.

If we think the poor african americans were a bit pissy and testy as they were deprived of access to basic human needs, start envisioning millions upon millions of citizens in the US discovering that they are being marginalized into destitution and impoverishment for the benefit of so few. What these Norquist freaks fail to realize is that the US is populated by the largest private ownership of weapons of any population in the world. We don't have sufficient troops, law enforcement personnel, nor private security forces to stop the eruption of overt violence that will precipitate from the collapse of basic needs support for the mass of the population. The world has seen nothing yet in comparison, and that includes the famines in Africa and subcontinental Asia.

Kikta yo kids...

More than half of American teens ages 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex, increasing to nearly 70% for those who are 18 and 19, according to the largest federal study of the nation's sexual practices.

The study also found that 11% of women ages 18 to 44 reported having at least one homosexual experience in their lifetime, up from 4% in a similar survey conducted in 1992.

Taken together, the two findings suggest a shift in sexual practices, in which females are using oral and lesbian sex "as a safer alternative than [vaginal] sex with men," said epidemiologist William D. Mosher of the National Center for Health Statistics, the study's lead author.

"If it is seen as a safer alternative, it is an interesting response to the campaigns to reduce teen pregnancy and to reduce sexually transmitted diseases and HIV," he said.

However, only 9% of the teens reported using condoms during oral sex. Studies have shown that gonorrhea, syphilis, genital herpes and human papillomavirus can be transmitted in this manner.

"They have not been given a strong enough message about the health risks of oral sex," said Dr. Claire Brindis of UC San Francisco.

hell's bells, what do these kids think they are doing??? "it isn't like we hooked up??" "we didn't have sex" "we just, well, you know, played around." Now anecdotally i can support the findings from my research over the last fifteen years of my own student's progress and development. In the last three years alone, numerous female high school students have stepped forward publicly to avow their bi-sexuality and overt lesbianism, when just five years ago that was a socially stigmatizing taboo. Before this study was released i had asked some former students from a decade ago, if they were aware of that much homosexual experience among their peers. They said there were not, and did not believe that they were socially able to engage in those behaviors as a response to the problems in the world around them because of the red neck christian ethical climate which surrounded them. In that some of that same christian ethic is promotional of chastity and thus encourages virginity while accepting irresponsible non-intercourse sexual behaviors, it should come as no surprise that more and more females are engaging in bi-sexuality while male homosexuality is declining in the same settings.

What strikes me as particularly dysfunctional is the excessive overt "advertising" of these traits, especially on websites such as yahoo personals and myspace.com. When you have a public forum encouraging young adults(and the all too many teens who lie about their ages to use the systems) to literally advertise their sexual preferences as a "cool" card, you are are society that has begun to turn away from the idiot moralizing and socially destructive fundamentalist ethic at the same moment that that group is insisting upon forcing that on people. This overt expression of sexual non-preferences is a revolutionary act in the face of the mounting campaign by evangelicals and fundamentalists to hold power over the personal cognitive views of the population. The only reservations i have are in the choices to not be safe about it, otherwise this trend is wonderfully radical.

Raptus regaliter:

When my bleakest long term predictions start being realized i am becoming more aware that there will not be much left of the US constitutional democratic republic for any of my grandchildren to grow up in. This pretty much sums up one aspect of something i said a long time ago.

President Bush proposed the creation of a "Gulf Opportunity Zone" to encompass "the region of the disaster in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama." You won't find specifics in Bush's speech, but you can find them on the Heritage Foundation's website, since it proposed the idea in its "manifesto on post-Katrina policy" last week. According to Heritage's plan, the "opportunity" in the zones is actually for the wealthy few and for special interests seeking to strip away government protections and regulations. Heritage calls for a panel of government and private sector officials to target "regulations at all levels" to be "eliminated or simplified," for capital gains taxes and the estate tax for the ultra-weathy to be repealed, and for waivers on environmental rules.

The US will build, is building as i type this, security camps(razor wire hung to keep people in) in the southern great plains full of trailers and manufactured boxes and reconfigured storage containers in which thousands of the impoverished descendents of slaves will live, work, shop, play, and maybe have some rudimentary education for their children. Meanwhile billions and billions of dollars will be spent on refurbishing the Gulf Coast to accomodate the latest and greatest billionaire homeland also in security camps, this time with the razor wire facing out and protected by the most expensive government financed private security forces that could have ever been trained in Iraq. It almost appears that Iraq was merely a testing ground for the type of development and services the US intends to provide for its citizens. The rich will get the luxury estates of their dreams built to their specifications while the rest of the population will live hand to mouth until they too find their way into the camps working for room and board in government sponsored company towns cleaning up hazardous waste and making toxic materials and products to be sold to China and India. Are you getting the idea, yet???? It is already fucking happening.

John Stossel the libertarian idiot

Finally one of the truly idiotic egos in the US makes my case for me:

You continue on your quest, and finally find that dreaded monster, the price gouger. He offers a bottle of water that cost $1 last week at an "outrageous" price -- say $20. You pay it to survive the disaster.

You resent the price gouger. But if he hadn't demanded $20, he'd have been out of water. It was the price gouger's "exploitation" that saved your child.

It saved her because people look out for their own interests. Before you got to the water seller, other people did. At $1 a bottle, they stocked up. At $20 a bottle, they bought more cautiously. By charging $20, the price gouger makes sure his water goes to those who really need it.

The people the softheaded politicians think are cruelest are doing the most to help. Assuming the demand for bottled water was going to go up, they bought a lot of it, planning to resell it at a steep profit. If they hadn't done that, that water would not have been available for the people who need it the most.

[...]

It's the price "gougers" who bring the water, ship the gasoline, fix the roof, and rebuild the cities. The price "gougers" save lives.

Now you have to really appreciate the philosophical principle behind this sort of syllogism. Let us get the picture of this altruistic water seller, standing on a corner with an ice chest out of which he pulls some bottled water and offers it for a completely unrealistic price. The water is something you need, for yourself and your child. The seller seems to have no needs except money(why this is the case in the middle of a huge disaster of course is not addressed) and is solely interested in generating private wealth from the property he controls. Withholding the property from those that need it intentionally inflicts suffering and possible fatal consequences on others. Stossel for some bizarre idiotic reason thinks a person is going to pay for the water because: they have the extra dollars floating around, they are wealthy but incapable of caring for themselves, that human beings will of course behave coldly rational in this situation, the water is available from a number of similar vendors, etc. When needs are not met, and when one is using desperation to increase one's personal wealthy the only rational logical action is to shoot the fucker and take the water and distribute it to others who need it for free. How could there be any other response.

it is all our fault of course... the blame game

James McWorther, that child of the Vernon Jordans, Robert Johnsons, Uncle Toms, wrote for the Manhattan Institute this ditty of apolofuckingetics for who is to blame for creating the visions on TV from NOLA.

This is the hell that most of the people in the Superdome either lived in or knew at close hand, and none of them could help being stamped by it. Welfare reform was only nine years ago. The women now past the five-year cap are mostly struggling in dead-end jobs. This is better than living on the dole. But these women are weighed down by too many kids created under the old regime to have the time or energy to get the education to get beyond where they are. Poor black neighbourhoods are not what they were at the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, but they are still a crying shame.

The poor black America that welfare expansion created in 1966 is still with us. Poor young blacks have never known anything else. People as old as 50 have only vague memories of life before it. For 30 years this was a world within a world, as is made clear from how often the Katrina refugees mention it is the first time they have ever left New Orleans.

What Katrina stripped bare, then, was not white supremacy, but that culture matters — even if what created the culture was misguided white benevolence. Social scientists neglect that before the 1960s poor blacks knew plenty of economic downturns and plenty more racism.

But before the 1960s the kinds of behaviour so common among the blacks stranded in the Superdome, possibly including multiple rapes, was a fringe phenomenon. Only after the 1960s did it become a community norm.

Well obviously the most important thing we can do is to return all of that welfare $$ and make sure that we reinstitute slavery as quickly as possible for all african americans--no wait--just for the poor ones, and the middle class ones, and well maybe the rich gangsta ones. This argument of his, other than being purely silly and inane without any citational support or documented data and research, does represent the thinking of those same white racists who bring us closer to an apartheid society not unlike that of most military dictatorships around the world. This "fringe phenomenon" certainly ignores the history of places like Detroit, East St. Louis, Washington D.C., and other locales around the US who experienced black on black violence and hostility from the earliest days. To desire a return to that period, as it seems poor ol' James would have us believe is best, further ignores the influence of african american athletic and celebrity success, most of which is garnered from the white people wishing to be like the blacks in the ghetto. But of course he makes no mention of that; why? Well he is already pushing his lack of expertise in sociology and to engage in discourse regarding role modelling and TV's influence and the success of advertising and media saturation of luxury lifestyles, would disprove his thesis. I wonder what he would say if, no when, this sort of crisis chaos occurs in upscale communities of good white folk. Then all that looting and ugly human behavior will have to be played out as something about liberal permissive child rearing i suppose.

UPDATE: well i didn't have to work to hard to find an example. Here is a story from Belfast today:
You could be forgiven for thinking that Northern Ireland had left its days of organized violence behind. The last few years have been relatively quiet, even encouraging: the peace process seemed to be making strides. Cranes hovering over Belfast's skyline were evidence that reconstruction money was flowing to the area. What's more, the Catholic Irish-nationalist movement's political wing, Sinn Fein, had recently gotten a decisive leg-up on the movement's military division, by convincing the IRA to agree to a ceasefire. But the IRA still hasn't given up its weapons and this week's eruption of violence underscores tensions caused by the fact that many of Northern Ireland's Protestants feel the IRA and Catholics have disproportionately gained from the peace process.

The mayhem that broke out in Belfast has left behind a disturbing amount of destruction, a surfeit of unsettling images, 60 injured policemen and massive social unease. Few deny that Loyalist Protestants were responsible for the weekend's violence: the rioting erupted on Saturday when Northern Ireland's main legal Protestant fraternity, the Orange Order, called for Protestants to mount sit-down protests on roads all over Belfast in response to British authorities' refusal to allow an Orange parade from passing along a main road on the Catholic side of town. Before long, the ostensibly peaceful protest had transformed into a hailstorm of automatic gunfire and Molotov cocktails.

The tenor is that of people rioting looting raping, burning and killing, just like NOLA? So what is McWorther's causal discourse here. Oh yeah, it must have been British socialized medicine and possibly the use of welfare funds to provide only for the poor catholics??? Obviously for Jimmy history over centuries is irrelevant.

unkiciktepi

The NRC granted a license to an impoverished indigenous tribe in Utah to make their money by storing 44,000 tones of nuclear waste on their land. They will call this a temporary repository until the final approval and completion of the national repository in Nevada makes that site available. What does this mean for all of us???

Well for starters, let us consider the term "temporary?" If you move and store spent fuel rods and other medium level radioactive waste in a spot, you tend to create a place that become radioactive. Hence all of the various places around the US that are horribly toxic from it in the first place. By storing the waste temporarily, we increase the amount we need to store later, in that the storage facility becomes waste as well. So we move more and more nuclear contaminants around the country on trains, particularly along farming and ranching corridors, thus increasing the risk of contamination of food supplies and whatnot. In other words, we begin to exponentially increase the problem without effecting any sort of remediation.

The other alternative is to turn temporary into permanent. Sounds okay right? In that you go to all the trouble to build a temp site to secure the materials, and then you can conveniently forget about a few hundreds years from now(Pu halflife is 24,000 years) and continue to use the site for a few generations. In this particular case however, the site is a lovely 25 miles upwind of Salt Lake City. Upwind!!! There can be no oops factor as SLC suffers from a terrible inversion layer problem, expecially in the winter. Should there be a leak or "dustup" of the site's material, especially in the winter, all of those aerosols would be concentrated in the inversion and held down in the SLC region for a considerable period of time before they are washed into the rivers and water systems. Not so good.

But none of this matters, right? Because well we have to store it and deal with it and anyway it is only Utah.

detour into arrogant elitism

In last month's Harper's there was an memoir essay by Lynn Freed that included the following paragraph. It reeks of such a hideous elitism and an egotistic self-righteousness--a consistent underlying theme found as well in the rest of the essay--that i am still dismayed that Harper's published that damn thing. It does however capture an aspect of the power relationship, hierarchical dominionization, to which i was referring previously. It is too good an example to let go unreported:

At about this point it began to dawn on me that the inmates were running the institution. I might have known. I had arrived at graduate school in New York City in the late sixties, right at the onset of the Age of Relevance--a time when, as Isaiah Berlin lamented, a whole generation of youth confused crudity with sincerity. What I was encountering now was simply the logical result of that revolution--the supreme relevance of the self in an institution that had ocme to depend for its continuance on the pleasing of that self. It was a self that took its reference not from history, philosophy, and literature but from psychology, a variety conveniently adjusted to the pursuit of personal happiness.

Her own essay must have come as quite a shock to her current students, if they had any willingness to criticize her work, in revealing her own irony in demonstrating her complete capitulation to herself and her desperate needs to be appreciated and respected. For she has built her writing career on travel reporting, an area supremely devoid of history, philosophy and literature while feigning that it includes snippets of same. But that is just my sensibilities being assaulted.

It is in her disdain for the pursuit of personal happiness that she really pisses me off. She, like so many others in academia, seem to think, that even though the students(yes and parents) pay huge sums to contractually fulfill a receipt of product and services, the students somehow owe they institution some submissive acknowledgement that the institution and its elites are know better than they do what is important in life. I can categorically say that they(the students) do not.

Perhaps the simplest way to address this issue is to realize that the inherent fallacy in the system is the claim made that universities and colleges represent "higher" education. 'Higher' is a hierarchical construct, forcing dominance and submission, rigidly or not, upon anyone who is labeled, or feels that they have been so labelled, or the person that does the labelling. It provides an immediate validation of the "i am better than x,y,z and/or you" statements that speak solely of personal power and not of generating human compassion and happiness. The 'higher' is used to refer to a body of knowledge that enables the person what obtains it to aspire to and acquire economic status and capital wealth. Thus those that serve in those institutions are charged with the responsibility of providing the information that allocates the hierarchical resources of the culture, of the system--knowing this equals this status equals this expected economic benefit and so forth. I have already shown that economic and social power are not providers of happiness, indeed they are clearly detrimental to the right to pursue of happiness by the people. It is in fact the universities and colleges that are coded by language and metaphoric constructs to symbolize and sustain the political and economic oppression of those that are not to be allowed to pursue personal happiness. The block quote above merely reiterates this same message in tones that are superior, classist, and elitist; the author just sounds like a bitch.

what's love got to do with it....

when we discover the intimate amazing joys of a romantic loving relationship we realize that in order to maintain the integrity and depth of commitment in that relationship we have to sacrifice some of our own personal happiness. this is well and good in the sense that it takes a while for people to come to terms with the subtleties of converting personal individual pursuits of happiness into acknowledging the cherish the welfare and blessings of the other as part and parcel of one's own happiness. one of the difficulties in attaining that awareness and finally the enlightened compassion which manifests as happiness surpassing that previously thought attainable, is with the manipulation of the details around which that happiness is generated as one party discovers personal power is more appealing and satisfying than pure joy filled happiness.

Personal power is not personal happiness. It is the capacity and ability of one person to express their presence in the world to others; to garner the accolades and appropriate submissive behaviors that are due one who perceives oneself as hierarchically dominant. Power relationships are not loving relationships nor are they producive of happiness, but they are the most common of all forms of human relations. More time is spent in our lives suffering from the manifestations of personal power than we give to our pursuit of happiness. We train our children to understand and experience and acknowledge this. We train those around us to submit to ours, or we learn to submit to theirs. So much time in fact that we lose our own sense of capacity to fulfill our own lives with the blessings of BEING.

No where is this more apparent than when people discover within themselves that they have submissively complied with the personal power of someone they previously felt that they loved in the most committed of ways. The discovery is an important but minor awareness that becomes more of a depression causality than a path to enlightened action. Of the few who make this discovery fewer still find the power to act on it, and remove themselves from their dependency on the other for granting of happiness and compassionate companionship. Parents start their children along this route, that is oft referred to as conditional love. "I love you, but i would love you more if yada yada blah blah blah.." Parents train kids to follow senseless and irrational rules, because the parent knows best(a considerable fallacy), as a way to show their love for their children as long as the child obeys the rules. If we can conceive that a parent who sends a child to a "boot camp for tough love" because the parent loves the child so much, they want what is best for the child, then we are admitting that such human relations are not as horrendously and insanely flawed as they are. Conditional love is personal power politics dictating control over the pursuit of another's happiness, and as such has lasting deleterious effects on the lives of those children and subsequent generations.

more later

Libertarians substitute property for happiness too

Make no mistake, those seemingly well meaning thinkers who craft excellent commentaries, full of thoughtful analysis and sourced citations, about the rights of the people to be free from the control of their own self created governments, are not friends of progessives. They are merely using the progressive forums and other liberalized spaces to argue for their deeply held FAITH in the priority of private property over happiness. They will argue of course that even though the very word property is not mentioned as part of the rights of the people, the inherent liberties endowed to the people, in the constitution that that it is there anyway. We just don't see it. It is imperative for them to insure that everyone fundamentally understand that money and property are more important than human life, more important than freedom and vastly more important than happiness.

They will put the acquisition of property as a right at the top of the pyramid of rights and relegate happiness to an obscure location. Why? Because they construct a reality that requires material possessions as emblems of their values, particularly in relational status with others. Matter is quantifiable and thusly it is easier to ascertain a degree of power as a measure of the quantities one possesses. Happiness and spirit are qualities and cannot be protected or evaluated or determined by numbers, by quantities. The concreteness of numbers is essential to the well being of the libertarian. They feel that they have attained hierarchical imperatives as long as they have surrounded themselves with matter that has numerically quantifiable value. They cannot view the world in any other way. Thus, they cannot possible imagine that their collection, and increasingly necessary protection, of material wealth is fundamentally detrimental to the well being of the planet.

When we hold the pursuit of happiness coequal with life and liberty, we discover that the only possible path to the pursuit of happiness follows from insuring a healthy sustainable species diverse ecologically whole Earth. Libertarians and their corporate conservative brethren see matter as an expendible resource through which they can derive value and power. Destroying the planet is merely evidence for the vast collection of power one has, the dominion over not just the earth, but all the living things upon it, including people. Libertarians are the first to tell you that no entity has the right(get this) to interfer with their right to use their rightful property in anyway they see fit. They are wrong. Their use of their property and their processes of acquiring and keeping it result intentionally in the deprivation of others. They require poverty to exist as a manifestation of their consolidation of material assets. The US is one of the very few nations that privatizes garbage and charges fees to use public lands as a mechanism to deprive the poor from access to possible material resources necessary for survival. Property is the symbolic manifestation of their destruction of happiness as a right of all the people. They demand that happiness be a commodity to be purchased through acquisition of wealth, not as a right of the people to pursue.

The most dreaded enemy of libertarians are happy anarchists, because in every way anarchists represent all that the libertarians cannot use governments to protect themselves from. In order for libertarians to maintain their control over their accumulation of assets they need to compromise their freedom to exist through supporting governmental or private security apparatus and entities. Giving up what they hold to be rights, they complete their own circle of hypocrisy upon themselves. Anarchists do not care about the laws of governments, nor the material assets of the people. Matter is not of the people it is of the earth. Arguing for this or that economic indexed system to maintain control over property, libertarians must argue that anarchists need to be imprisoned for thinking how they think. Their thoughts are dangerous because they are threats to the very core beliefs that the libertarians hold so dear. Anarchists are threats to the stability of maintaining the control of the populations during periods of chaos for the libertarians because no matter how much one has acquired they cannot eat money, the symbols of held assets, or the assets themselves.

What drives this engine of madness is fear; the massive anxiety that somehow, someway the libertarian will lose their tenuous grasp on reality if they cannot claim that they have property in their possession. They cannot be happy without it, and thus they enforce their beliefs, much like the religious fascists of the world enforce their beliefs, on everyone else. It is the fear that they cannot conquer, and the anarchists love to do everything in their power to instill that fear.

parents squeeze happiness out of life

Money--it's a shame!
How many times in our lives do we encounter parents, our own too, and/or siblings, destroying the potential joy gleaned from pursuing happiness through demanding that the off spring reject that path in favor of seeking wealth. What is it about the pursuit of wealth that makes it hierarchically imperative over one of most important human rights/?? Reframing every discussion between parent and child around the need to accumulate and properly use economic resources, always suggesting that later, much later, if ever, some personal happiness can be derived if all the economic realities are fitting into the perfect life jigsaw. Herein lies the deepest destruction of our rights, our cognitive ones as well. We are told, over and over that we first have to "make a living for ourselves" before we can enjoy the fruits of our labor. This farming biblical injunction is just that, an injunction against the pursuit of happiness, long a staple of the church during the Middle Ages, coming again into the fore during the early 1800's industrial revolution's expansion wherein young children were forced to work in the slave shops, and now found invariably in the religious and libertarian right who hold the view that poverty is a character flaw.

To listen to parents of adult children, tell the child that the parents know all that is best for them, that they don't know what life is about, that they are too ignorant to understand the complications of being alive--is some of the most ironic idiocy imaginable. It is a pure attack on the rights of the child, the rights of cognitive liberty and the pursuit of freedom particularly. Parents of course are often guilty of violating their own children's first amendment rights especially the religious and speech protections. But parents go deeper than that; they actively seek to destroy the will of the child to pursue happiness in order to faciliate the child's participation in the wage slavery upon which this great nation is based.

WE have an obligation to not support this; to actively intervene in protecting the rights of children. Taking away these rights, parents are supportive of everything that is destructive of our constitutional liberties and freedoms. They teach their children that it is irresponsible to advocate for one's own rights. It is in fact proper to interfere with the rights of others. If we can't see this and begin to address it, then we have lost any hope whatsoever of living free.

happiness as dementia-God only knows

Another key piece of evidence of the destruction of our right to happiness is the failure of reality to insinuate itself within the minds and culture of those citizens committed to the war and to the christo-fascist agenda. Actively engaged in the most vile of irresponsible attacks upon the pursuit of happiness the reich warriors have used character assassination, insults, slurs, lies, deceipt, false realities, pseudo and totally falsified science, and so forth to instill their unhappy values on the rest of the population. The overt desire to turn the US into theocracy governed by castes of priest within whom reside the sole arbitration of law and rule, has demonstrated for the rest of us that these people have absolutely zero desire to allow any further pursuing of happiness unless and only if it is strictly approved and conducted under their aegeis. Their hands are everywhere in mucking it all up, insisting that their congressional, executive, and judicial cohorts and cadres remove, repeal, and prohibit any and all cognitive liberty, along with all behaviors that give witness to cognitive liberty, from the US.

Why?? Well i think one central commonality of their thought process is the desperate denial of reality. They cannot and will not accept what is true and factual, because to do so they would be forced to admit that none of what they believe to be true about the world, about the US government, about their religion, about their way of life, is real. Many of them know it is all broken, they know that the life sustaining systems of the planet are collapsing, including the economic ones. Yet to admit this would mean that they do not know what is going on or how to fix it or what life means anymore. Therefore the escapist christo-fascist denial of reality predicated on selected literal readings of various versions of mistranslated texts provides the removal of responsibility for reality from themselves. They get to make up who is the enemy, focus their mighty collective wrath upon them, smite them and lock them up throwing away the keys. Then they can go home and still shudder in the dark.

This specific and targeted attack on cognitive liberty is well orchestrated and very well funded. The purveyors of economic acquisition, the neo-feudal lords of capital rise above the laws, insuring for themselves that they retain their cognitive liberties, while funding and regulating the removal of the same liberties for those that they feel will only interfere with their pursuit of wealth at the expense of the well being of the planet. We are in deep shit, and are without voices of protest over this. The war is only one trivial aspect of this march towards a christo-fascist theocracy in the US. Fronts are opening everywhere in all of our daily lives. Removing happiness enables the dramatic increase in endless suffering caused by mass poverty, famine, non-existence of health care, increasing homelessness, and masssive institutionalization of the population. You will either be one of them, living insanely out of touch completely with reality, or y ou will be one of the aware and enlightened and thus forced into servitude and imprisonment for pursuing individual cognitive liberty.

pissing on each other's happiness

Recently i had the opportunity, if i could call it that in any positive light, to witness up close and too personal the bitter battle over individual happiness in a relationship. The experience for me provided a lesson that i think serves many of us in our quest for cognitive liberty and understanding how our own values take on hierarchical frames that leech into our relations with others.

First let us at least agree that the US was created by people whose understanding of enlightenment philosophy predicated the principle of a citizen taking an active and fully aware role in their responsibility for insuring that their pursuits of their own personal happiness did not denigrate nor fundamentally interfere with other citizens' pursuits. This is the ideal and the core underlying principle of cognitive liberty and the first amendment's civil liberties. Thus one would like to believe that as we have evolved both as a nation and as an "enlightened" technologically freed society, we might have also evolved our responsibilities to suit. This of course is pie in the sky thinking, yet is at the core of the very debate on civil rights and civil liberties we are experiencing now in the US.

Now, for a variety of personal developmental reasons, the two people in the relationship i observed spend a disproportionate amount of their time trampling on one another's pursuit of happiness. Indeed they go out of their way to damage it, to interfere with it. And they justifying doing so through their perceptual constructs that are predicated on their personal values as the hierarchical matrix for judging behaviors. In this case it gets down, quite literally, to: "my gardening is better than your music." Do you see the disconnect here? Reducing another's pursuit of happiness to the targets of ad hominem attacks is justified by equating one's set of personal values with what is "good" for everyone. The examples of this just within this relationship are too numerous even to catalog.

Suffice it to say, the causality of the core dysfunction comes from the parties' upbringing. One experiences excessive degrees of paranoia about their material security in the world, grown from being forced by their own values to make life work along certain preformed patterns. This leads to the overt desperation to demand that others respect them through demonstrating control, power, and mastery of the immediate conditionality. By this i mean, that this person will make immediate verbal negative value judgements of whatever phenomena is being experienced, demanding that others in that event horizon acknowledge this individual's vast wisdom on a variety of subjects, many having nothing to do with the phenomenon, all streamed out in a verbal unending, unlistening assault. The insecurities of this person are palpable and visceral--enough to make one's skin crawl.

The other person, through their own lifetime of relating to dysfunctional upbringing and codependencies of friends and peers, reacts to the world through disengagement and alcohol. Refusing to become involved in "conflict" until it becomes too prominent and overbearing, then consuming sufficient alcohol in order to breakdown the inhibitions against engagement leading to confrontation and bitter rancor, all of which reinforces the now long held construct that one needs to avoid conflict. The circle is vicious and is spiralling more and more out of control i think.

The insecurity of maintaining material possessionship of property drives one to bitterly harangue the other into spending their economic resources on audio/visual reproduction equipment to literally drown out the nagging insults. The nagging then castigates the technology as a flawed path citing their own gardening as a vastly superior path, for no other reason than that there is nothing else for that person to do. It is also where the battle over dollars gets lost. If we allocate financial resources to each, we discover that the gardener has an income of approx $20K while the entertainment freak grosses $70K. Of these two piles of revenue each must expend an equal share for mortgage, utilities, food, etc. Thus the gardner has very little disposable income, and relies, insecurily on the other to provide funds for entertainment, transportation, recreation, commodities, and yes funds for gardening. The entertained receives in return for these funds some degree of domestic support, sexual pleasures, body work, and companionship up to a point--the point of nagging bitter paranoia which happens more than once per day. The entertained has considerable disposable income and chooses to expend it in a variety of ways including the development of the latest and greatest state of the art audio/visual equipment.

The gardner must garden to provide some food resources(zero protein, mostly complex carbohydrates) supplemented by expensive organic and natural foods(which are paid for by the entertained). What the gardner doesn't know, and chooses to ignore when discovered, is that the entertained expends considerable resources going into town each day and purchasing fast food meals to supplement the lack of fats and protein in their alcoholic diet. That hidden behavior, along with the sheer volume of alcohol consumed, increases the gardner's insecurity, and thus bitterness and anger, leading to more nagging and to the entertained seeking to increase the volume of the entertainment and alcohol. Round and round.

Now it has gotten down to whether gardening is more or less valuable than entertainment. At least that is the semantic battle; realistically it is all about using whatever means necessary to interfere with and stop the others' pursuit of happiness. My happiness is more important than your happiness because i say it is so. And like so much of our culture today, neither would recognize this, nor would they accept that they are engaged in this, even when directly pointed out to them from statements they just made. The classic "I didn't say that" response to being called out on what one just said, is all too common here in this little scenario as it is in the culture. The ad hominem attacks, the implications that the other is flawed and damaged while asserting that one is fine and without flaw, reiterates through the core of the relationship.

Is spending $2000 a year on growing flowers and view blocking plants(a real paranoid pattern here) "better" than spending $2000 a year directly on impacting one's own personal happiness? No i think not. Each represents a utilization of economic resources to facilitate the enhancement of one's personal happiness. Each represents efforts to disassociate from the world, hiding within a coccoon of protection from the outside by enveloping themselves in the warm fuzzy environment of happy. Neither serves to enhance the other, nor to provide substance to life outside of the happiness(one might try to argue that the vegetables grown serve some greater good for the other, but that is clearly belied by the endless use of vast resources to acquire fast foods). Both demand that they be judged to be the one in the right, when neither is functioning in a healthy sustainable compassionate manner.

Thus we live in times when we as citizens have completely forgotten our responsibility to not interfere, to not interrupt, to not damage other citizens rights in pursuing happiness.

destroying the pursuit of happiness..

this happened last night!! can it happen anywhere else, is it happening anywhere else?? why is it happening?? Is it that we now live in a fully militarized police state operating under the auspices of a christianized theocratic authority formed to counter those islamic ones in Southwest Asia??

my friend Nick was one of the musicians at the event, here is what he had to say....

"Tonight, I was booked to play an event about an hour outside of
Salt Lake City, Utah. The hype behind this show was huge, they presold
700 tickets and they expected up to 3,000 people total. The promoters
did an amazing job with the show.. they even made slipmats with the
flyers on them to promote in local shops.So, we got to the show around
11:15 or so and it was really cool. It was all outdoors, in a valley
surrounded by huge mountains. They had an amazing light show flashing
on to a mountain behind the site, the sound was booming, the crowd was
about 1500 people thick and everything just seemed too good to be true
really. Well...At about 11:30 or so, I was standing behind the stage
talking with someone when I noticed a helicopter pulling over one of
the mountain tops. I jokingly said "Oh look, here comes big brother" to
the person I was with. I wasn't far off.

The helicopter dipped lower and lower and started shining its lights on
the crowd. I was kind of in awe and just sat and watched this thing
circle us for a minute. As I looked back towards the crowd I saw a guy
dressed in camoflauge walking by, toting an assault rifle. At this
point, everyone was fully aware of what was going on . A few "troops"
rushed the stage and cut the sound off and started yelling that
everyone "get the fuck out of here or go to jail". This is where it got
really sticky.No one resisted. That's for sure. They had police dogs
raiding the crowd of people and I saw a dog signal out a guy who
obviously had some drugs on him. The soldiers attacked the guy (4 of
them on 1), and kicked him a few times in the ribs and had their knees
in his back and sides. As they were cuffing him, there was about 1000
kids trying to leave in the backdrop, peacefully. Next thing I know, A
can of fucking TEAR GAS is launched into the crowd. People are running
and screaming at this point. Girls are crying, guys are cussing... bad
scene.Now, this is all I saw with my own eyes, but I heard plenty of
other accounts of the night. Now this isnt gossip I heard from some
candy raver, these are instances cited straight out of the promoters
mouth..-

One of the promoters friends (a very small female) was attacked by one
of the police dogs. As she struggled to get away from it, the police
tackled her. 3 grown men proceeded to KICK HER IN THE STOMACH.- The
police confiscated 3 video tapes in total. People were trying to
document what was happening out there. The police saw one guy filming
and ran after him, tackled him and his camera fell, and luckily.. his
friend grabbed it and ran and got away. priceless footage. That's not
all though. Out of 1,500 people, there's sure to be more footage.- The
police were rounding up the staff of the party and the main promoter
went up to them with the permit for the show and said "here, I have the
permit." The police then said, "no you don't" and ripped the permit out
of his hand. Then, they put an assault rifle to his forehead and said
"get the fuck out of here right now."Now.. let's get the facts straight
here.This event was 100% legal. They had every permit the city told
them they needed. They had a 2 MILLION DOLLAR insurance policy for the
event. They had liscenced security guards at the gates confiscating any
alcohol or drugs found upon entry (yes, they searched every car on the
way in). Oh, I suppose I should mention that they arrested all the
security guards for possession.

Oh another interesting fact.. the police did not have a warrant. The
owner of the land already has a lawsuit against the city for something
similar. A few months ago, she rented her land for a party and the
police raided that as well. And catch this, the police forced her to
LEAVE HER OWN PERSONAL PROPERTY. That's right. They didnt arrest her,
but made her leave her own property!!!Don't get it twisted, this is all
going down in probably THE most conservative state in the USA. And this
is scary.. a gross violation of our civil liberties. The police wanted
this party shut down, so they made it happen. Even though everything
about this event was legal. The promoters spent over $ 20,000 on this
show and did everything they had to to make it legit, only to have it
taken away from them by a group of radical neo-con's with an
agenda.This was one of the scariest things I have ever witnessed in
person.

I can't even begin to describe how surreal it was. Helicopters, assault
rifles, tear gas, camoflauge-wearing soldiers.... why? Was that really
necessary?This needs to be big news across the USofA. At least in our
music scene (edm as a whole)... this could happen to any of us at any
time. When we're losing the right to gather peacefully, we're also
letting the police set a standard of what we can get away with. And I
think that's BULLSHIT!The system fucked up last night... They broke up
a party that was 100% legal and they physically hurt a lot of people
there at the same time. The promoters already have 6 lawsuits ready to
file with their lawyers and the ACLU is already involved.I'm sure some
pictures (and hopefully some video) will surface soon. I'll make sure
to post them up here on 404, so you can see the Police State of America
at work."

mmmm.. pondering the times

are they changing??

Over the next few days i want to write about that one little phrase that seems to have been lost on the imaginations and visions of the US populace: THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. Certainly listed by Jefferson as one of the inalienable rights of human beings, yet mysteriously discarded by those in this society who have developed a fiscal fascination for their personal anxieties. If the pursuit of happiness is right up there with life and liberty, and we see these three principles, not in a hierarchical matrix, but rather as a covalent equal trinity--a foundational triangle upon with the US democratic republic was created--then we begin to understand that the responsibilities of leadership and citizenship require all of us to embrace a deep and passionate concern for our pursuit of happiness. At every point, in every way, pursuing happiness has been attacked, denigrated, misconstrued, ignored, abused, violated, and so forth, particularly by conservatives as well as by some neo-liberals and most of all by libertarians. It is imperative that we understand how our failing to live up to protecting this most sacred of rights has destroyed this nation, and threatens in every way to destroy the planet.