The Crow's Eye

Compromise

2012-01-26T15:30:00.002-05:00

I'm not grateful for new employment. The money is terrible, but it's nice to be doing something, and to have a little extra for, I dunno, groceries. There's only so many times you can feed two growing children pasta or chicken thighs before you find yourself face down in a muddy pool of teenaged rebellion. Not that I'm against teenaged rebellion. I just prefer it directed...elsewhere.

The grocery money is nice, all things being equal, which they are not. But I'm far too old to have any gratitude for work, or for being directed around the stock room by a child. Work blows hot dog chunks. Orange-pink flecked half digested kibbles of mechanically separated trademarked meat substance.

Even more especially when what's playing on the overhead is country music. I'm not suggesting to you, by way of vicarious memory, the dulcet melancholy of a blue grass which gets low to the ground and stays there, or the dusty and dirty back shack moonshine fiddling of Appalachia and the bayou. I mean what was coming out of the speakers, all fucking day, was New Country.

If you want a reliable formula for cracking the code of New Country, I'll give it to you.

Aaah, that's a lie. I'm going to type it whether you want it or not. So...

Start with today's date. Dial your mental clock and calendar back twenty years. Try to recall whatever was topping the charts as mainstream pop-rock those long, lost twenty years ago. Remove any bass lines which groove. Add a steel guitar. Stir in one or more white people willing to confuse nasal warbling for singing, and have them improvise a "story" based in dialogue written by George Lucas or Michael Bay.

New Country.

And I could almost ignore it, by hour three, except that it seemed like every twenty damned minutes the station was airing this nasty little gem:

I'm not surprised the god goons of NHforMarriage and the NOFM finished up their moral figuring and settled on a New Country station as the best outlet for the melted butter bigotry of, ahem, compromise. And I'm probably the second or third last person who thinks that a law is the way to keep Teh Gays from being discriminated against, or from being married in the naves of Christ-moldy church-holes.

But fucking aye, you'd think the shitclowns at NHforMarriage - and in all their brother organizations - would have kenned by now that pretty much the only people in New England who give a fuck about the cohabitating and vow-making of homosexuals are the kind of people who also think it's a good gods-be-damned idea to drop tonnage on Iran and send das troops into Syria.

If you're looking for what degrades or corrupts the, heh, marriage bond, you ain't ever going to find it the affections and affectations of homosexuals. But, you will find a whole lot of sundered wedded union in the wake of deployment, military industrial centralization and the austerity which follows war upon war. That shit is disruptive. The gays, not so much.

Not that any of it matters. The same fucking lackwits who can reconcile their affirmations with endless war, and who can even come to believe in it, are certainly capable of scapegoating dykes and queers for their own broken marriages.

Still, by the sixth or seventh time I'd heard it, I wanted to crawl up into the rafters and shake loose the speakers. There's only so much ign'ant a person should allow through the sensory filters on any given day. And then you just got to go find a motherfucker what needs some punching...

Cat's Paw Choosing

2012-01-25T09:01:00.001-05:00

My cats sit at their food bowls off feeding times, certain in the magic efficacy of their own corporeal presences. Looking up with expectant eyes, as if to suggest to me by mystical notions that, yes, their being at the bowl is all the sign I need that they too have a vested interest in the outcome of my actions.

And when I do not feed them directly, even if only an hour after their last feeding, they yet persist. Eyes to empty bowl, and then to me. And back to the bowls again. Doing their cat sorcery.

I do not feed them. Not until it's the time arbitrarily set by the human gods who occupy these rooms.

But they insist on making the show anyway, convinced of their magic prowess. Certain that they have moved me to pity. Sure that their arrival at the place is all they need to achieve their ends.

It reminds me, most of all, of Americans queuing up at the polls on voting day.

Wasted sentiments

2012-01-19T12:14:00.000-05:00

I don't understand the outrage over laws. Laws follow power. They do not create it. Everything you need to know about a law comes down to this: can it be enforced?

If yes, then the law is clown paint. If no, an invitation to disrespect.

If the power exists to enforce the law, then the outcome is already given. If the power does not exist to enforce the wasted sentiments on a legal page, those sentiments are as wasted as any written about law.

SOPA, NDAA, AUMF, Resolution 1929 - they mean nothing. If the power exists, the law follows it. If it does not, it's about as useful as Bob Avakian's wishful thinking.

Sacred Monsters

2012-01-12T15:34:00.006-05:00

Ours is a peculiar age.

Judging from the mediated outrage attendant upon the revelation that American soldiers lack the proper respect for their recently corpsified prey humans, there seems to be a notion, prevalent at least in the commentariat and corporate media, that soldiers don't behave that way.

I don't know what herbs the outraged have been smoking, or how deep their cynicism actually runs, but I think perhaps that what they are, in the end, is victims of their own propaganda.

We live during a period of history in which populations and their gatekeepers are so medicated with symbolic anodynes that it's quite possible those selling their outrage feel some semblance of it, and genuinely.

But, ours is a peculiar age.

If history can be trusted - and some measure of it reflects old truths, despite the visible hand of the victors in writing it - there are a few constants to civilization:

1. Large populations are ruled through religion, law and force of arms.

2. Usually, the religion and the law are imposed by force of arms, until such time as subsequent generations learn to adhere to the beliefs and attitudes of their masters, and the long sleep of self-policing takes hold upon the somnolent body politic. For any polity or civilization durable enough to last beyond its own founding epoch, an internal enemy is required. This enemy is the social whipping boy. This enemy symbolizes the failures which follow from disobedience, faithlessness or an incomplete absorption of the prevailing moral norm: licentiousness, wanton sexuality, illicit esoteric acts, the stealing or corrupting of youth and perhaps most egregious of all, the formation over time of defensive sodalities. See, Jews in Christendom. Women, in Greece. The capite censi and Phrygian mystery cults, in Rome. Palestinians, in Israel. Et cetera ad nauseam ad infinitum.

In the US of A, the whipping boy has historically been black people. They endure the physical and moral nightmares of the long sleep of peace; they are the receivers of its transference and the scapegoats for the frictions and problems which tend to arise and accumulate in memory, whenever humans pretend that living together in large hive like structures is somehow native to the hominid condition.

And, to do unto whipping boys, a society will need to produce people who want to wield the whip.

3. Whenever a polity, society, region or civilization enters a period of flux, doubt or insurrection, it produces not only discontent, but those who try re-established lost faith by attacking the visible symbols of its decline.

4. This insecure type is already drawn towards enforcement, even during eras of relative quiet. In fact, soldiery and policing depend upon the twin attractions of sanctioned violence and permissible punishment. Whether during flux, when all discontent tends to be folded into the category of internal enemy and scribbled over with the attributes of the whipping boy, or during the decades of peace which punctuate the more common human tendency towards irascibility, those willing to do violence against doubt are made sacred by the uniform. The uniform hides. The uniform reveals. But most importantly of all, the uniform permits.

5. Not surprisingly at some point a population usually develops a healthy and rational disregard for cops and soldiers. Men with permission to do violence and a reward at the end of it will act violently. They are already temperamentally suited to it by a disposition towards acting out their insecurity on the heads and bodies of weaker persons. And they are paid to stay insecure while wrapped in moral and physical armor.

The soldier, like the cop, has not been well received for much of recorded human history. The soldier means death. The soldier, like the cop, is a reminder that this life is lived for the enjoyment of those people who can afford to pay the soldier. The soldier is an ill omen. If you can see him on the streets, somebody in power is feeling dicey. Throughout much of history, the soldier was set apart in barracks and special colonies, for his own good. Quarter the soldier with the people, and the people will eventually cultivate a taste for killing him.

But, ours is a peculiar age. We wouldn't dare...

Because, we are reminded daily, "we" love our soldiers. They are the best of us. The brightest. The backbone of the nation. A soldier is God's special angel with a backpack and a rifle. "We" invent and repeat whole cloth fictions about how the disobedient routinely mistreat soldiers, spitting on them and refusing to celebrate their glorious return, at airports. The soldier, like the cop, is a well armed victim. He is surrounded by lesser men, jealous enemies who would degrade his spiritual orgone and unman his virtues with negative vacuum vices.

It's a liturgy in its own right, this Mass of the universal golden soldier.

It's also background. So look at the foreground. Look at what the be-rifled soldier does. Examine this cult of the noble warrior not for its conceits or its maudlin sales pitch for jingo tchotchkes. Take a long hard gaze at what the showmen are working hard to conceal.

Which is everything that soldiers exists to do.

But, we are a peculiar people living in a peculiar age.

So, instead of taking comfort in the reminder that soldiers are by and large the sacred monsters of this final Americanist age, we get sophomoric sentiment instead. And are expected to mumble it into our own cups, as well. We are told, all over the print, the display and the telly screen, that our soldiers are and ought to be better. That we have to need them to be better.

We are instructed in image and text to need them to be elevated. To perform their wars and occupations as if they were less and more than the human, and anything but the sort of men drawn to blood sport and sanctioned degradation.

The real worry, though, would be angelic soldiers. What we who are ruled should fear perhaps most of all is an age of war and occupation where soldiers did not act like soldiers, in which there is no corpse mutilation, cruelty, disrespect for the dearly departed, cultural ignorance, anomie, adrenaline thrill murder and the disregard for the feelings of the natives sufficient to provide for the dehumanizing distractions warriors and soldiers are wont to seek when in need of provisional entertainment.

I know there's a whole lot of shocked sentiment or bored cynicism about the subject, but truthfully if our lords and masters ever manage to breed and train up a perfectly behaved, respectful, culturally sensitive and gentlemanly species or type of solider, we are well and truly fucked.

Our governing caste of powerful families serves a ruling class armed with imperfect instruments. If they ever manage to produce a well behaved and moral soldier, we can kiss dislodging them from power and from their colonial redoubts within history and memory, for a very, very long time to come...

*

h/ts to:

Rob Payne
Justin
IOZ
Al Schumann

New Hampshire

2012-01-10T20:35:00.001-05:00

Romney: I will give you austerity and war and you will thank me for my lily white face and my squeaky shoe Mormonism.

Obama, from the White House shadows: Yeah, but I'll give you austerity and war and someone to blame for it.

Goldman Sachs: Meh. It's all good for us.

Petty Squabbles

2012-01-06T00:10:00.000-05:00

I guess a certain blogger needs occasional reminding that an attempt at an inversion - and one which is admittedly undertaken with a decent chance of failure in mind - is not the same thing as a "rehabilitation."

Guffaw

2012-01-03T12:39:00.003-05:00

"American women face a stark choice in the Iowa caucuses: re-elect feminist President Barack Obama who has advanced equality or caucus for a Republican who pledges to roll back generations of progress."

~ The Younger Pelosi

Law has no power

2011-12-26T08:39:00.002-05:00

If laws were routinely passed, but no loot was set aside to enforce them, so that they were effectively nothing more than suggestions for conduct which the average resident could adhere to or ignore at leisure, we would have a far different understanding of law the currently we do.

What we have - and what has been our occidental tradition, harkening back all the way to the first glimmer of supposed civilization in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, the Levant and polities of Hellas and Megale Hellas - is quite different from all that.

We have the passage of laws, statutes, codes and decrees - and the apportioning of weapons, wealth and armed staffers to enforce them. Our tradition of legislation comes with punishment, and the threat of punishment. We have gods who punish, and fat old men who refuse to disperse slave-made toys, as a punishment. We are threatened with discipline at every turn, and we are raised from toddler until retirement age, and beyond, to believe deeply and with an unshakable certainty that actions not only have human consequences, in the form of violence, imprisonment and the loss of status, but divine ones, in the form of self-destruction, bad luck, heavenly corrective scourges and everlasting damnation.

Our predecessors have produced variations of culture and credulity ranging from the fantastical to the nightmarishly bureaucratic. Our history records the numinous spirits of forest and riverside, a thousand divines in olympic contention, pantheons of bickering child-gods, and the current all-seeing monster who populates the brain spaces of most Muslims, Christians and Jews. We have had decades of doubt, and ages of faith. We can look back, as well as looking back allows, and scan the flowering of the Provence, and the explosion of regimental Prussian might, separated by less than a thousand miles, and fewer than a thousand years.

And despite the seeming limitlessness of our cultural variations, and individual perspectives, we have as a constant the passage of laws, and the enforcement of laws.

We have learned to impose, and to be imposed upon.

And it's all a set of fictions.

Really, it is.

The law is powerless. It does nothing. It achieves no end. It accomplishes no outcome. No law on the planet binds you, because no law can bind you.

Look instead to the weapon in the hand of the enforcer. To the threat of the slap from mommy, or the loss of her love. Watch the teacher's ostracism of the troubled child, how a little boy is slowly set aside from his peers, is isolated, is twisted and warped into a young man who has turned self-defense into a protective cruelty. See the priest poisoning the minds of the young, encouraging the madness of faith in the pettiest, most vicious, most hateful god built up into a sky daddy monster yet. Know that the good reverend, the pillar of the community, encourages mass delusion and a lifetime of self-betrayal, every time he casts aspersions at the harlot, condemns the godlessness of the teenager who flushes at his first boy-crush, or rails at the sinfulness of a nation which dares to allow women the freedom of their own bodies. Hear them teach about hell, and a concentration camp in the afterlife from which there is no escape.

See the cop with his gun, the soldier at attention, the jailer with his grin and the judge who sits above the mere humans arranged in rows for his judicial enjoyment.

It's punishment.

It's punishment.

The thing which which twists us up, which teaches us to police ourselves and neighbors, which faces us with a daily set of choices, all of them bad, and most of them worse, is punishment.

It's our lives - our labor, the wealth we create, the sacrifices we must endure - turned against us. That's what punishment is - the capture of the output of our work, its conversion into weapons and wages for armed staffers, and the threat and use of those weapons, against us.

The law achieves nothing. The outcome of its enforcement is everything.

We don't need to fear the law.

And its more than possible to lose the fear of enforcement. There's an emotional terminus to obedience. You can arrive, there. We can.

Our earthly masters have a lot of weapons, and a lot of leeway to use them. That I grant.

But we know where they build those weapons. And we know where they train their users. We know how they feed themselves, and we know where they sleep. We know - and we can know - how they get from home to work. We know where they work. We have every capacity needed to study them further. We are makers and watchers, because that's how we've been trained. We are observant of power, because that's how they shaped us. Every aspect of their lives is discoverable, and their behaviors are discernible. We already have the tools necessary to ending their reign of power and punishment.

And there just aren't all that many of them.

But there sure are fucking multitudes of us.

Natural Defecation Authorization

2011-12-21T23:55:00.001-05:00

According to a number of blogs and websites, ranging from the Bircher to the Beech Street Choir Boys, we're all supposed to be like wicked upset about an acronym.

Specifically, the NDAA, which from what I gather is this totally nefarious parcel of freedom destroying paragraphs, subsections, clauses and dispositions which wipe away our ability to resist the police and shit. Oh, and it prevents people from doing dissenty stuff that Uncle Sam might treat as terrorism, or the corporate press will escalate into a story about public safety and the public good, about keeping the children protected from the monsters under their beds.

Not for nothing, the people really upset and pissed about this de jure restatement of de facto policy are white. And law abiding.

I wonder if these white people are like all in the doldrums because now there's some legislation which allows the cops and the Feds to get away with acting as if white people were black, hispanic or "illegal", or some shit like that.

Because the last time I checked, it's already fairly routine for people to be rounded up, held on trumped up charges, and shuffled into indefinite detention (or sent to the death house) with little or no evidence, or on executive say-so. Because they're not-white. Because they make unapproved social choices. Because they don't toe the line. Because society doesn't prize their obedience enough to spend loot teaching them how to police themselves.

And I'm frankly as tired of white people complaining about suddenly becoming the nigger and the Other as I am of Canadians who get themselves into a miff-midden because Americans are shitty voters who are at least smart enough to realize that voting doesn't make a difference.

People eschew voting for the same reason that people steal: it makes sense, if you can get away with it. Too many people vote, and not enough shit gets stolen, if you ask me. Not that you're asking. But whatever.

Laws aren't real, like money isn't absolute value. Laws are as unreal, and unrealistic, as paper currency. If you take a handful of dollars and wipe your ass with them, you've got some pretty - and pretty well used - toilet paper. The same applies to laws. Or vote ballots.

Only thing which gives them power is faith. What allows the law any power over your conduct is confidence. Sometimes that faith serves your survival needs, especially when there's a policeman two feet away, brandishing his aerosolized poison in a can, his right hand clutching at a tool designed to punch fatal holes into human bodies.

Sometimes it just doesn't, as in often. Because there just aren't enough cops in the world, or laws on the books, to tame an unruly people.

I'm not saying you're obligated to go out your front door and get all unruly. Your thing is your thing, and it isn't easy to jettison a life time of obedience training, socialization and faith in civilization. Most of what makes an individual feel individuated is in fact quite commonplace: mammalian needs, cultural conditioning, dependence upon arbitrary rule-making parents, abuse and desires thwarted. We are, I imagine, less individuated than we tell ourselves.

Think about it: what makes the rich contemptible is their freedom from the commonplace, isn't it? Not that they've managed to inherit or steal lives which allow them to satisfy their desires and escape the punishments which discipline lesser mortals - but that to keep their lifestyles, the rest of us have to be disciplined into wage-slaves, to be bound up in restrictive norms, imprisoned in self-betrayals and programmed deficiencies, shackled with bad morals and bad consciences and otherwise made into instruments and tool-people. We get squandered, so they can squander. We're interchangeable, and we were shaped that way.

I'm not talking mere metaphor, here. Go on, quit your job. Break the rules. Walk up to a cop and punch him in the face. Throw a bouquet of harmless flowers into your Senator's face. Get close enough to the President to call him names, and then curse at him.

You will be replaced. By someone who has the same basic pre-programmed moral and social template that each of us believes is special and unique. Sure, I've got a picture of my wife and kids on my moral cubicle, while you've got your calendar open to the photo of a beach in the Caribbean, or if you're more of a dork, to some fantasy rendition of a dragon slash muscle car slash airbrushed approximation of a supposedly desirable woman-as-toy.

We're replaceable. And we fucking know it. It's why people develop pathologies, pursue obsessions, get depressed, masturbate like zoo caged orangutans, fiddle with religion, aim a gun/bow/magic spell at a digital demon, gossip about the office "whore," discuss films like they're personal adventures, read novels, cultivate hobbies, yell at the kids as if their futures are important, and do all the things that replaceable people do to distract themselves from their fundamental instrumentality.

It's why, I think, we haven't killed the fucking rich pricks dead, yet. The laws certainly aren't keeping us in place. Because laws don't work like that. And there aren't enough cops or soldiers on the planet, to keep people obedient.

It's that we know, because we were trained to know, that we aren't really fully human. We are, morally, intellectually and emotionally, machined parts.

The NDAA wasn't written to provide a sea change to public policy. It doesn't really change anything, because even without its passage, you, I and most everyone else can already be taken into custody, processed through the system, and incarcerated until the end of our days. With little cost to our earthly masters. And on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Don't take my word on it. Go ask a black American. Or an "illegal" Mexican. Or the eighteen year old just busted for "distribution" because her tail light was out and she had enough herb in the car to get herself and a couple of her friends stoned for the night.

If you quit your job, you will be replaced, and the machine will operate without you. If you go to jail, someone else will take over your daily functions. If you go to jail for long enough, someone else will slot his or her self into your family or role, and one day "your" kids won't even be yours anymore.

The NDAA wasn't written for you. It isn't a threat to the average American's life. It's not a law to get upset about. It's like fretting a law requiring you to take a shit. Don't goddamned worry it.

Unless you're ready to make the leap from machine part, to monkey wrench, that is. And then, it ain't nothing at all. It's less than nothing. It has no power. That's the fucking beauty of the de-moralization of your head space. Once you become an actual threat to lawn order, the worst they can do is cage or kill you. The laws don't fix themselves in your head, anymore. They become scenery. They stop being plot. By the time you're free, you're already free. And the game begins in truth, then, doesn't it?...

Music, slowly

2011-12-21T09:00:00.001-05:00

Getting Creamy

2011-12-15T14:13:00.001-05:00

Robert Creamer, of the Huffington Post, has written a whopper. Let's just get right into it:

"Sometime in the next 15 days, the last American troops will leave Iraq -- and the War that began almost nine years ago will finally come to an end."

Of course, that really depends on what you mean by "war." If you intend a nineteenth or twentieth century definition, there was never a war in Iraq, for Obama to be able to end it. Congress declared no commencement of hostilities. The government of the nation of Iraq did not surrender. Instead, the US, along with Britain and a bunch of throwaway client countries, murdered off anywhere between one hundred thousand and one and half million Iraqis in order to establish a weak central government with a reduced power to develop the hydrocarbon and mineral resources under its nominal control. This was accomplished by isolating the somewhat more centralized predecessor state with ten years of crippling sanctions and a cease-fire violating regime of air terror, maliciously and unironically referred to as a "No Fly Zone." When its leader failed to yield, the country was invaded, occupied and bombed with millions upon millions of pounds of explosives. As of 2005, a mere two years into this occupation, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing had dropped more than 500,000 tons of ordnance alone, in Iraq. That was six years ago. From a single Marine aircraft wing.

Over that nearly decade long adventure, the US and Britain conducted untold numbers of checkpoint kills, dragnets and night raids, disappearing tens of thousands of Iraqis into a global gulag. Coalition forces twice destroyed the city of Fallujah, leveled portions of Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and other cities, dismantled or destroyed the water, educational, health and transportation infrastructures, covered the countryside and the cities in uranium dust from the use and detonation of "depleted uranium" munitions, forced more than a million Iraqis (one out of every twenty persons) to flee their homes, built a network of crusader fortresses, and secured for their governments SOFA and "Strategic Framework" agreements to make the most hardened imperialist proud, giving the US near carte blanche to conduct raids, air missions and anti-terror campaigns in and over Iraq. The US and Britain also leave behind, in Iraq, a privately managed army of mercenaries, contracted to the departments of State and Defense, the Ministry of Defense, and their putative client, the Iraqi central government.

This was not a war. This was a conquest. It's still a conquest. As in, ongoing.

If you're working within the neoconservative/neoliberal war powers framework, it's even simpler. "The War" is not ending in Iraq. It's just entering a new, privatized phase, one which still guarantees profits to defense contractors and munitions manufacturers, but which leaves the current and subsequent presidential administrations the leeway to pretend they care about the concerns and sovereignty of the Iraqi client state and the citizens it claims to represent.

"Today, President Obama addresses some of those returning troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The big difference between those troops and many others who have returned from the War in Iraq, is that none of them will be deployed on yet another tour to Mosul or Kirkuk or Baghdad -- or any of the other Iraqi cities that became so familiar to Americans over the last decade."

This is demonstrably false. The Strategic Framework Agreement foisted upon the government of Iraq not only allows US based companies to colonize the Iraqi economy, but it grants explicit permission to the government of the United States to redeploy soldiers and personnel within Iraq, with the flimsiest of "security" pretexts. US armed forces will still occupy a number of bases constructed over the last ten years, positioning them as a forward projection force for any current or future conflicts in Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon or Afghanistan.

"The end of the War in Iraq is a major event in American history, since in many ways, that War was the defining historic event for an entire generation of Americans."

Which generation would that be? The one currently facing permanent structural disemployment, austerity and social triage? Or the one getting stoned, fucked up and pharmakon'd into oblivion in perhaps the only genuinely rational response to austerity, declining prospects and a governing generation self-obsessed enough to call their parents "the Greatest" and themselves the "end of history"?

"There are those who would minimize the importance of the final withdrawal of our troops from Iraq by pointing to the unfinished business of the War in Afghanistan, or the use of civilian contractors. Those are important issues, but they should not diminish the extraordinary significance of the fact that the Iraq War has come to an end."

No, it has not. And how do you minimize the non-existent?

"Most importantly, Progressives -- and all of those who fought for a decade to prevent and then to end the Iraq War -- should take a moment to celebrate the fact that they have won a critical, historic battle."

That's a nifty trick, there. A little clumsy, but neat all the same. You see, progressives should celebrate that fact that they not only failed to prevent "the War," but that pretending to end it symbolically is a "critical, historic" victory. That's some funny shit.

"There is a lot of cynicism in America -- a sense that it doesn't matter what you do -- that ordinary people can't really have an impact on the big decisions and big institutions of our society. The end of the War in Iraq shows that the cynics are wrong. "

You have to appreciate the pedestrian effort to define cynicism in puerile terms, as if Americans are somehow incapable of understanding the sentiment which is most fundamental to American politics, entertainment, education, war-making, marriage and child-rearing. And it doesn't stop there. Creamer actually proposes, one imagines with a straight face and his tongue kept between his palates, that the progressive failure to prevent or end a war is a refutation of cynicism itself, demonstrating that "ordinary people" factor into the decisions of our ruling class and its factions of elites. I don't even fucking know what to write about this, except that Creamer is a terrible propagandist, unless he's the subtlest ironic artist this side of Russell Brand's puckering starfish.

"What began in 2002 as an effort to avert the war in Iraq, grew to a chorus of millions who changed the political landscape and who kept fighting until all of our troops came home. That movement elected a president who promised to end the war -- a president who this week has kept that promise."

Alright, Creamer. It's just not fun, or funny, anymore. Not only has the political landscape remained a constant, despite economic flux and social disruption, but the very last movement with the potential to change that landscape with the anti-war one. Millions took to the streets, and Bush invaded Iraq anyway. Then, Americans chose Bush over Kerry. The war continued, got worse. Thousands of Iraqis died. Then tens of thousands of them. Bush, with Democratic approval, escalated US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then Americans voted for Obama, who was utterly silent as Israel murdered Palestinians in Gaza with impunity. Obama took office, and almost immediately committed to dumping tens of thousands more soldiers into Afghanistan, under the command of two of the most brutal generals in the last fifty years (McChrystal and Petraeus). He forced the Iraqis to accept a humiliating framework for future economic colonization, spread the drone war to Yemen, expanded it in Pakistan and Afghanistan, gave Israel cover to prepare for renewed attacks on Iran and Lebanon and reconfirmed funding to the military junta which replaced Mubarak. He has continued his predecessor's policy of funding and arming terrorists in Iran. And he carpet bombed Libya, while providing tactical support, funding and air superiority for a cabal of women-hating racists who gun-raped Qadaffi right before they gave concessions to England, France and US based companies which will follow a fire sale of Libya's mineral, transportation, water and petroleum infrastructure to European and American firms. This is the same Obama, we should remember, whose smouldering contempt for women and their self-possession is without modern parallel in a President. The same Obama, it's worth noting, who has endorsed harsh austerity measures to compliment his Administration's efforts to force Americans into even more restrictive client to patron relationships with insurance companies, auto manufacturers, banks, prison complexes and privatized educational rackets. He is completely dedicated to not only preserving the Drug War, but expanding it and the prison industry - and he has recently promised to refrain from vetoing legislation which will put the stamp of law on the de facto militarization of law enforcement and local government.

I mean, come the fuck on, Creamer.

Or, whatever. I'm going to scrounge up some booze and celebrate the fact that it only took me three years to find a job. Which starts...

...in February.

(You can read the rest, at AOLHuffington, if you want. It's progressive dogwhistling, blaming Republicans for policies that have full Democratic support, and lionizing Obama for "fixing" Bush's mistakes. I don't have the stomach for any more of it. If you are healthy, sane, self-possessed or smart, you won't have the stomach for it either.

My apologies for the republish. Hated the original title.

Anyway, thanks for you time. Or not, ya fucking fucks.)

Kayfabe

2011-12-12T10:03:00.001-05:00

When members of the middle class protest and tamely express dissatisfaction within the bounds of polite society, it’s munificently treated as discontent, for a while. When the poor and working poor do it*, it gets added to the FBI’s database of statistics about crime.

(vainly quoting my own self)

* - more practically and with a better attempts to results ratio, I might add...

Fukushima Diary

2011-12-12T09:02:00.002-05:00

Fukushima Diary.

h/t "KZK" @ Ian Welsh

Legal Advice

2011-12-11T10:36:00.002-05:00

Shakespeare was right about the lawyers.

Radio Silence

2011-11-19T21:54:00.000-05:00

Just been threatened with loss of custody, criminal charges and other legal action if I don't force my son to make a thousand mile "round trip" he patently doesn't want to make, and which we honestly fear will result in his failure to return should he be forced to go. Thank you for your time, and for your hours, days, weeks and years of consideration. It's been a pleasure. I am a better man for the gift of your criticism, your commentary and your own many insights, observations and original sentiments.

(I do hope to be able to do this again sometime in the near future, but right now the meat world demands our "undivided attention.")

With friendship, camaraderie and respect,

~ Jack

Threat

2011-11-19T14:49:00.005-05:00

You have no rights which have been threatened. The law does not protect your rights, because you never had any - even and especially when you're afraid "anarchy" might undo your claim to three and a half bedrooms and job in academia.

There's already only anarchy, idiot.

Sure, now you're waking up to the fact that the pretenses which you've believed - especially the ones which allow you to justify the three and half baths and the State Police Benevolent Fund sticker on your bumper - were rights are just that. Pretend. Fictions. It is no credit to you that you're finally figuring it out. There are about three and half billion people, on any given day, who've already been living without that excuse to submit, and with none of the benefits attendant upon your submission. Their lives probably suck more than yours. And that's the point, isn't it?

Because there's already only anarchy, you fucking compromised piece of shit.

It's just that you've been on the side of the bullies for so long you've lost the ability to sort out that you're the one paying for the bullies, while the poor pay for your roads and your tax credits. And you're the cops' justification. You are their reason for being. Those are your democratic institutions, so-called, which demand cops for the protection of enclosed, private property. Those are your public educational systems, and your investments in biotech and solar energy, which produce and re-produce this system of control. A system, you full well know by now, that must forever expand, control, repress, export and co-opt, or it collapses.

You're a company man; you're a fucking client. Of course you know it. It's how you do business. It's what you teach the little kiddies when you teach them respect for the law, and merit, and being successful and well-adjusted in this world if degradation and misery.

And it's the anarchy of the wealthy that you've been pretending is law, order and a system of inalienable rights all these years. That's your republic. Those are your liberal institutions. It's your quaint little Methodist quilting club. It's the punitive, regressive taxes paid by the poor who've got no property and no stake from which to draw deductions. It's your groper frat boy son, taking advantage of three hundreds years of pillage, rape, slavery, labor breaking, oppression, war and imprisonment that funded the building of his campus experiment in alcohol poisoning. The mortar holding the bricks atop each other in his dorm room is the raw material of wasted human lives. That's your legal title to 1.5 acres and a mailman who smiles at you: the death of millions.

You never had any rights. None of us do. Rights are lies. And you aren't under threat of losing them now, anyway, company man. You never will be, because you've already proven time and again that when the anarchy of the poor threatens to spill over into your shitty little life, you'll put your hand to the telephone and dial up the authorities. You've got your stake, and that means you get to pretend that law and democracy are real and that they'll take care of you. That you're better-than, because you've been bought and paid for.

And those fictions will protect you, for a price. Right up until they don't anymore, because you've joined the ranks of those who can no longer afford it. That's your angst. This is the source of your current worry.

It's also the intersection of the anarchy of the rich, and the anarchy of the poor.

It's an intersection famous for accidents and you, you fucking fuck - you're going to know what it's really like to feel the threat of loss and bewilderment, when your accident comes. Because the rich will triage you and the poor are going to remember that you've always called the cops.

Oh, happy day...

Language

2011-11-19T11:50:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you have to speak the enemy's language, or he won't be able to hear what you have to say. Hell, he might only know about you, in theory. You may only exist to him as an obstacle. Or as a bundle of potential or manipulable reactions. If his response to your existence is a life destroying legal action, he's looking to break you with your fear. If his reaction to your discontent is to send in ten cohorts of the peace legions of the homeland, it's your terror at death and injury, your dread of punishment, your horror at ostracism and recrimination which he is trying to provoke. You aren't human to him. He has no word for your humanity, in his native tongue.

If you play make-nice and do-good with him, he may not be able to comprehend. He might not even speak the language. Perhaps the best response is to use the language he understands.

Busy

2011-11-18T21:08:00.005-05:00

You can always count on AOL-Huffington's Fashion Magazine. When its publishers and editors aren't doing public relations work for Christina Hendricks's dress maker, or running anti-Iranian propaganda written up directly by the State Department's Undersecretary for Lazy Lies, you can count on them for a strained, melodramatic indignation at the slightest hint of unsanitary political language:

"As we learn about the man who shot bullets into the living quarters of the White House, an unnerving fact has emerged: The shooter believed that he was on a personal mission from God and that President Obama is the anti-Christ."

I don't know if there's a god or not. You don't know. Huffington's writer doesn't know. And the millions and millions of people who rifle up in the name of Jesus, Vishnu, Allah or the Nichiren mantra don't have a fucking clue either. But, it's not like it's all that surprising that people believe that the divine fucks around in human affairs and gets a stiffy at the prospect of dead infidels. This is kind of what religion is about. And I don't mean the dreamy, perfect religion of endless love what belongs to every true Scotsman who ever got it in his head to insist that the maker of the universe has a crush on him. I mean the historical religions of the world. Death dealing, fulminating, damning, castrating, witch burning, finger cracking, slave trafficking and raping is what religions have accomplished, and what apologists for faith have justified, since the first wet slab of clay had the first symbol for a bull god incised into its surface.

It's hardly "unnerving" that another god-sot with access to a murder tool put one and one together and gave credence to the voices in his head.

The attack on the White House and the first family is the result of an almost casual use by President Obama's political enemies of iconic religious imagery.

Sure it is. This guy was out to kill the whole treasured, innocent and unsuspecting "first family" - you know, those firsts among equals - because Obama has political enemies who condemn him with unfavorable religious symbolism. It's not because the whole five thousand year history of recorded religious belief is an unrelenting record of deceit, manipulation, lies, false dichotomies, double binds, hysterical breaks, rape rackets, slavery, child abuse, crusade, jihad, holy war, peonage, degradation and other behaviors which harm and warp their victims for life.

It was "political enemies" who made this man drive up to one of the most heavily guarded imperial residences on the planet and take an utterly quixotic shot at one of its windows.

The shots are a violent echo of the 2008 election when the rumor of Obama being "The One" surfaced through an ad by the McCain campaign. As Mara Vanderslice, then of the Matthew 25 Network, who now works in Obama's Faith Office, wrote:

'At best, this ad implies that those who plan to support Senator Obama are looking for a new savior or a replacement Messiah. But many are reading it even more darkly as an attempt to portray Obama as an anti-Christ figure.'

So, let's see how this works: Candidate Obama, who steeped his campaign rhetoric in the overt symbolism of an aggressive and evangelical Christianity, who called on the same God that allegedly enjoys the ripping open of the wombs of his enemies, and the dashing of children's heads against rocks, the god who sends bears to murder children for the crime of mocking a Biblical inquisitor's balding pate, this candidate was targeted - no less - by the damaging, frightful of words his political opponents, who, in a surprising breach with custom, used similar religious rhetoric to call his character and mission into question? Is that about right?

Yeah, I could see how that would be truly awful. And how, several years later, it would be exactly echoed by a single gunman with the voice of God rattling around in his head and with no apparent plan to elude the authorities. Of course there's a causative relationship. It's not like the President has done anything untoward or reprehensible in the intervening years. It was the rhetoric of his political enemies that done it, obviously.

As the 2012 campaign gears up, we are once again faced with the prospect of sinister religious rhetoric that paints opponents with hyper-charged and potentially lethal brushes. The case of Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez proves that words matter with potentially horrific results.

I shudder at the thought. I suspect you, dear readers, have already reached for your security blankets. Because what's genuinely frightening in this big, bad world of ours is political and religious rhetoric. Words which are so "hyper-charged" that they unleash a storm of lethal brushes.

This case has certainly led to horrific results. I mean, can you imagine what would have happened if he'd broken two windows. Or if the evil thought demons unleashed by Obama's political opponents had resulted in a new and insidious website devoted to discovering signs of Obama's apostasy as revealed in a Jesus faced slice of pizza? And, I'm loathe to even put to words the image of a bullet of sinister rhetoric piercing the shattered heart of a political ally, breaking his will in an act of reprehensible verbal terrorism, and preventing the passage of the only "jobs" bill that can save the planet.

Let me say this as clearly as I can with my head still attached: President Obama is NOT the anti-Christ.

No doubt, he's not. He's too busy for all that. Obama is a man with a lot on his plate. Between handing millions of captive clients to predatory insurance companies, compromising with his alleged "political enemies" to criminalize or price-out abortions for anyone who isn't wealthy or the rapist son of a Senator Whatshisname, orchestrating the overthrow of aging dictators who fail to completely neoliberalize, saber rattling at Iran, providing cover for an Israeli strike on the same, transferring billions to Arab client states who do play ball so that they can crush their restless dissidents, prosecuting the drug war more zealously than his predecessor, doubling down on the incarceration racket, and collaborating with his "political enemies" again, this time to punish the poor and the working classes with higher use taxes and austerity, he's been somewhat pre-occupied with winning the bet he had with Petraeus and Panetta that he could kill more non-combatants with sky death robots in three years than that no-talent scrub, Georgie Boy Bush, could do in over the course of eight.

Of course he's not the anti-Christ. He doesn't have the time for a minor gig like that.

Serpents

2011-11-18T10:31:00.007-05:00

This is a garter snake:

It is not dangerous to groundskeepers. It is an attractive animal, and its venom does negligible harm to humans. Some people keep them as pets. The garter snake is often ground up in the blades of lawnmowers, or run over by children on bicycles. This can be inconvenient for property owners, but they rarely lose any sleep over the proximity of a garter snake. You can also routinely find this snake dead, in the middle of roadways. They share a fondness for the shenanigans of suicide squirrels. When frightened, a garter snake releases a strong musk from its cloaca. This musk has a fearsome stink, but that's probably the only thing scary about a garter snake. Raptors, corvids, crayfish, raccoons and other snakes feed upon garter snakes. Baby garter snakes are a snack for shrews and frogs. Very few groundskeepers have nightmares about garter snakes.

This is a copperhead:

It also known as the death adder. It is not a garter snake. It is not as commonly found in yards and lawns, or upon golf courses and roadways, as the garter snake. Perhaps it is a more intelligent serpent. Copperheads are extraordinarily talented camouflage artists, and prefer the woodlands and forested hills of North America. They have been known to climb trees, in order to hunt. Unlike garter snakes, who prefer to take shelter in lawn mowers, copperheads are ophidian ambush experts. When approached, they "freeze," or become very, very still. Remember, they are exemplary practitioners of camouflage. Sometimes stupid hunters, and other people who do not belong in un-Enclosed woodscapes, discover to their woe and chagrin that copperheads are right under their feet. And that they will, when cornered and threatened, bite. Unlike garter snakes, a copperhead's bite can cause discomfort. And pain. It is a fact that stepping upon a copperhead is bad for one's health.

This is a cottonmouth:

As with the copperhead, the cottonmouth is a pit viper. It is also known as a water moccasin, or a water adder. Cottonmouths are quite at home in swamps, riparian zones and watersheds, streams, lakes and ponds. The cottonmouth, who will even foray out to sea, is a world renowned swimmer. The cottonmouth is also not a garter snake. When threatened it will stand it's ground and show its fangs. From thence, comes its most common name. For, in showing its fangs, it flashes the milky white interior of its mouth. Can you picture it? You're a groundskeeper and you're just walking along, swinging your cattle prod, enjoying the autumn air, and you encounter a cottonmouth, head held high, fangs exposed, white mouth gleaming, standing its ground. You might even reconsider your career choices, if you were a smart groundskeeper. Because, the cottonmouth delivers a nasty bite. It can be very painful. And when left untreated, fatal. A person intruding upon the cottonmouth's natural habitat should be careful not to threaten this wonderful creature. For example, land developers and golf course designers might take some precautions when traveling in cottonmouth country. Or, they could bugger off entirely and instead try their hands at selling country club shares in the antarctic.

This is a timber rattler:

It's taxonomical name is Crotalus horridus. Garter snakes are occasionally heard complaining about timber rattlers. Rumor has it that the timber rattler has developed a taste for the garter snake. Poor, poor garter snakes. They should cower beneath tool sheds, where they feel safe. The timber rattler, like its viper cousins, the copperhead and the cottonmouth, is wise enough to pack venom when it goes on its travels. The timber rattler may in fact be the most dangerous snake in all of North America. It has very long fangs. And a "high venom yield." The timber rattler has such a "fearsome reputation" that past revolutionaries turned it into a symbol of their willingness to fight:

It's not that the timber rattler is an aggressive animal. It's not, really. You just shouldn't try to make it obey. The timber rattler is not a pet.

This public service announcement brought to you by the letter S.

Travels

2011-11-17T14:29:00.021-05:00

Human persons do not have root systems. That is to say, we are not trees. Being a tree has its advantages. Trees, when not chopped down by humans or felled by lightning, live very long lives. The verdict is not in, yet, on whether or not trees know that they are trees or that they live much longer, more fulfilling, more useful lives than humans.

Evidence does suggest that humans do not live as rewarding lives as trees. Don't blame me. Blame the evidence. Or, if you are moderately to very wealthy, blame all the poor people. Poor people are like working people, but without as much crippling debt recorded in the ledgers of the banks and governments owned by all the wealthy people. Poor people and working people have bad morals. In that, they are like trees, which just sit there and take life. Moderately to very wealthy people don't just sit there and take it. No, not them. They do things like "grab life by the balls," and "man up," and "seize the horns," and "grab themselves by the bootstraps," oh, and let's not forget, "earn a living."

Lots of living creatures have testicles, colloquial known as "balls." To the best of our knowledge, very few of them respond positively to being molested by wealthy people who are on their way up the ladder of a meritocracy or more traditional hierarchy. Also, that's not really a ladder the rich guys are climbing. Those are human heads they're stepping upon. Anyway. Take note, wealthy people: fondling balls will not make you more money. It is surprising that you have to be told this. If it did make money, you'd be teaching ball-fondling in your schools. Oh, wait. You do. But, you don't call it ball-fondling. You call it football. Or Church. And there is money in it. Just ask Joe Paterno. He made so much money off the ball-fondling supervised by Penn State College he was able to give his wife a half-million dollar home for the nominal transaction fee of a single dollar. She's a lucky gal. But at least she is free of the balls that up and coming wealthy folk are compelled to clutch to prove that they have what it takes to be affluent. The lesson here is that wealthy people cannot be trusted around balls. Or small children.

Come to think of it, all those people and animals who don't have balls should just avoid the rich, as well. Who knows what they'll come up with next, especially when they tire of grabbing living creatures by their scrotums. And their track with regard to ovaries, uteri and vaginas is even worse than their one with the balls. When it comes to ball fondling, they're all like, "Hey dude, I've got to prove I can be one of the rich motherfuckers who just don't give a fuck."

For the human-like creatures who have lady parts, it's much, much worse. "Don't be a bitch" means "don't lie there and take it." Alternately, it can convey frustration with unwarranted complaining. You know, like a woman does. Because that's what women do. They complain all them time, while they lie there and take it, and then they do a bunch of labor which very few people are willing to call labor, or remunerate them for, because God (who has balls) and country have decided that this is what women have to do to not be beat about the head and face. Women's work is like a ticket to not being beaten. Only that it isn't. And most people know by now that it doesn't go very far towards preventing rape. But, whatever. The bitch was asking for it.

Hey, at least women aren't treated like kine, anymore. Well, not exactly like kine. That would be going backwards.

Just remember, some girl cows come with horns. Hard, pointy horns.

And what is it with "seizing life by the horns"? Bulls have horns. Goats have horns. Deer and moose have horn-like structures known as antlers. Rhinoceroses sport horns. And elephants, horn-like tusks. Goats are ornery creatures. In fact, goats are so ornery and fickle, the word "capricious" means "goat-like." Goats head-butt, kick and bite. Goats hate fences. Why would anyone want to go around grabbing goats by their fickle, fickle horns? And cows and bulls? How is messing with their heads healthy? Have you seen what a bull does with those horns on a good day? Imagine an angry bull being molested all about the head and horns for the amusement and profit of wealthy people. Fun times, fun times. That's almost as stupid as attempting to wrangle and hog tie a mother rhinoceros in view of her children.

Hey, wait a minute. Poor and working people, I think we've got a thing or two to learn from goats, rhinos and bulls.

Especially the part about them being like super wicked lazy and not earning a living. Those glorious, liberated fuckers. Have you ever seen a rhinoceros key her time code into the machine? I think not. There's no managing her company time. Hell, it's well nigh on impossible to mobilize rhinoceroses into companies in the first place. Something to be said about animals you just can't wrangle.

Wait. Where were we?

Humans. We were discussing humans. That's too bad. An angry mother rhinoceroses charging a rich white dude trying to net her and tie her up so that he can cut off her head and horn to prove he's manly even during his off time is so much more interesting. Especially the part where he gets to explain to his other wealthy companions why they may no longer grab him by the balls, as his testicles now adorn the earthen trophy shrine of a particularly satisfied mother rhinoceros.

But, humans. Humans are not trees. They travel. Moderate to very wealthy humans travel to and around places and locations where there are poor and working people available to wash their clothing, cook their meals, point at paintings, drive them to theaters made famous by the patronage of kings (who are rarely poor) and who generally exist to make life more comfortable for the people who have had enough experience in grabbing balls, seizing horns and shutting up bitches to deserve to be wealthy; this is called tourism. Whew, that was a long sentence. I assure you, I did not need to grab any balls in order to write it.

Humans who are not-wealthy also travel. Their travel is rarely labeled "tourism." Mostly, it goes by the name of "getting by," and it costs them money to do it. It costs them even more money not to do it. Money is like that. "Getting by" is like that.

If you are reading this, and have not yet taken offense at the characterization of your existence as a cavalcade of molestation, head stepping, animal abuse and mistreatment of women, it is more than likely that you belong to the ranks of the not-wealthy. It stands to reason that you find getting from today to tomorrow expensive. Being not-wealthy is like that.

Your travel options are somewhat more limited. When you take a vacation - which word means, to vacate, to flee, to escape - you've probably had to either (a) go in debt to wealthy people, which ends up ruining your memories of your temporary escape, or (b) save up for several years, just in time to have your car break down, the city cancel bus service to your neighborhood, or your boss, who gets to treat you like property whenever you forget to act like an angry lady rhinoceros, inform you that your services are no longer needed.

Most travel by the not-wealthy is survival related, and involves going from points A or B, towards some kind of point C, D or E. Point A is a poorly built structure owned by the bank. A bank is a collection of very, very wealthy people who become even wealthier by making irresponsible decisions with poor and working people's meager earnings. Point B is a poorly built and poorly maintained shelter owned by a renter. A renter is a person or company, often enough a bank or doing business with a bank, which has the legal right, obligation and power to expose you to the elements and keep all your stuff, should you fail to remember that you are neither an angry bull nor a pissed off lady rhino. And should circumstances compel you to mimic the capriciousness of goats, perhaps by choosing to feed yourself or your children before tithing your tribute to the renter or the bank, they may ask the law to put its formal seal of approval upon their efforts to immisersate you entirely, before exposing you to the elements.

Poor and working people, therefore, do a lot of traveling. This kind of travel must never be confused with tourism. When traveling from points A or B, to Point C, a poor person can rarely afford herself the opportunity to hire other poor people to do her laundry. Besides, laundry is woman's work. If a woman is not doing laundry, how will a horn grabbing ball fondler know not to beat her with the straps from his boots?

Many women no longer have the good fortune to be wholly owned chattel who may be married off by their fathers in transactions to secure grazing rights, or business partnerships. This puts them in a precarious position, when traveling. A large number of men, raised up in the schools wealthy people build in order to prepare the next generation of poor and working people, find it next to impossible to properly identity a traveling woman's proprietary markers. This may cause them noticeable distress. They often confuse her liberty of movement with a loss of male patronage. To best express their concern over the poor woman's failure to secure the protections of a man, they will whistle at her in despair, describe her anatomical proportions in a loud and demonstrative fashion, and become visibly distraught at the prospect of her departure from the protective aegis of their fields of vision.

Sometimes, the poor and the working poor, will make it from points A or B, all the way to point C. Point C can be best described as a place where the labor of hundreds and thousands of other poor and working people is devalued in order to sell the output of that labor at a profit. Profit is a process by which wealthy people who have passed the pupal and larval stages of ball grabbing and horn seizing demonstrate to themselves and others that they have earned the ability to brag about making it all on their own in this dangerous, miserable world. This, they call "lifting oneself up by the bootstraps." In brief, bootstrapping involves pretending that the labor of others and the profits skimmed off that labor are in no way connected. For wealthy people who own point B type buildings in which poor people inconveniently store themselves for the winter, inconsiderately depriving the elements of bodies to which cold, snow, wind and rain might be exposed, this is known as taking rent. However you look at it, it's obvious that the poor and the working class deserve what happens to them. They should have figured out how to levitate with their hands around their ankles, already.

Sometimes point C sells food "stuffs." Food "stuffs" do literally that. They fill a body up. Once stuffed, a poor person may be less likely to travel off the reservation, and start acting like a higher animal, preferably one with unseizable horns. Food "stuffs" need not provide complete nutrition. The wealthy people have written laws which clearly demonstrate that partial nutrition is good enough for the poor and the laboring. The poor do a lot of traveling from points B to C to acquire this stuff. Most of the stuff which is good enough for the not-wealthy refuses to behave like its supposed to be durable, or healthy, or useful over the long term. This is as it should be, the moderate to very wealthy people insist, usually in front of cameras. If they owned companies which produced healthy foods and durable clothing for people who refused to levitate whilst clutching at boots, where would all the jobs go? And then what would the poor do for work? And how would the wealthy be able to afford to have companies which provide the poor with sort-of nutrition, and almost-clothing? The not-wealthy can be very unreasonable. They have even reduced themselves to taking - just reaching out and grasping at, like pushy goats or other dirty animals, such as monkeys - the healthy food and durable goods intended for the moderate to very wealthy. The gall of those people. If the moderately to very wealthy don't live more fully human lives, and get to do tourism traveling a minimum of four times a year, how will they elevate their spirits high enough to keep all the poor and the workers in jobs? Have you thought about that, poor people? Do you have any compassion? Or does your failure to earn self-esteem along with your living make you not only prone to criminality, poor taste in dress, bad eating habits and terrible choices in living arrangements, but also to immorality?

Still, the ingrates do need the basics.

Sometimes a point C distributes clothing and household items to the poor and the laboring, for a nominal usage fee equal to a completely reasonable one quarter of yearly earnings. Often, it's cheap distractions, or the means to receive them in one's own (that is, the renter's or the bank's) home, which the wealthy advertise as new and exciting entertainment. These distractions often include stories about wealthy people who travel and have great adventures where all the poor brown foreigners are grateful to serve them and learn civilization from their betters. Often, in these stories, wealthy people own companies so that the poor can have the self-respect of a good job. Sometimes they're about wealthy people who solve crimes and protect all the good, hard working, decent poor people from other poor people who have forgotten that they are not horn'd beasts with cause to smash about in china shops. For special circumstances, on Wednesday nights for example, the viewers of distractions are treated to a serialized tale of well educated wealthy people who are tolerant of their equally well-educated, articulate, property owning black and homosexual neighbors. And during the daytime, there are stories about dashing and/or pretty wealthy people who have exciting and fulfilling love loves, or animated heroes who would never think of breaking the law, farting in polite company, or pushing the jefe off a cliff towards a well earned end.

Speaking of the endings tales and travels, we approach our own.

Just remember, when you are out there, traveling from your points A or B, to your points C and so on, you might encounter one of these:

...especially if you've taken to the illegal and disreputable notion that being human sometimes requires a body to act like it has horns. This (above) is an LRAD device. It is used for "crowd control." "Crowd control" is another way of saying, "preventing people from getting together and acting like they are beasts with horns, tusks, antlers and a reason to use them; or dispersing those who have already gathered." The LRAD works by producing high decibel sounds which cause pain, harm to your ears and disorientation. Their purpose is make it uncomfortable to be near to or around them. Three city blocks is too close for comfort, when it comes to LRADs. The LRAD has a long range of effect. Many police departments now have LRADs.

LRADs are cutting edge technology. Unfortunately for the producers of these perfectly civilized "crowd control" devices, earplugs effectively render them useless. The average cost for a pair of reusable earplugs is $5. Sound neutralizing ear muffs may cost as much as $14. Sometimes they can be found just lying around on the shelves in stores staffed by disgruntled employees. Disgruntled employees often appreciate a hot meal on a cold day.

And if you do happen to have to travel from the bank or your rental company's property to your employer's property, take care when passing through areas peopled by persons who insist on living lives which are actually worth living. The police are paid to take notice. Sometimes those police arrive equipped with LRADs. Just as often, they show up bearing other gifts. These armed and dangerous magi may employ "riot control agents":

...the most common of which is "tear gas." Tear gas is not a vomiting agent. Vomiting agents in "higher concentrations" cause vomiting, nausea and "malaise." Unlike tear gas, they do not cause skin irritation. For travelers who do not have the good fortune to belong to a society for the promotion ball fondling, one recommendation is to carry your earplugs in a bandanna, or in a free for the taking cough mask provided by nearly every hospital or doctor's office from Boston to San Francisco. Tear gas, mace and pepper spray do cause skin irritation, and in combination with vomiting agents, can lead to the unfortunate early demises of persons gathered together in a confined space for long periods of time, but who are prevented from leaving by virtue of being surrounded by peace officers in closed or combative riot control echelons and phalanxes:

"...When a [gathering of people who should be at work, or shopping for crocs, and therefore deserve whatever happens to them] is in full swing, police will deploy in a square formation with a command team at the center. The command team is protected on all four sides by echelons of troops deployed in groups of 10 or 12 officers. There is also an arrest team at the center of the square.

This tactical unit is very mobile and able to adapt on the fly to changes in the situation. If a threat suddenly appears behind or to one side of the unit, then the echelon facing that direction is designated the front of the unit. The entire team can then change the direction it's facing without a lot of maneuvering. Also, the echelons can cover each other when the team moves to take advanced positions. If the unit is under attack, the whole team does not move together: One echelon moves while the others provide covering fire or an actual physical screen (with riot shields). Then another echelon moves up into position.

The echelon is not meant to be an impenetrable wall of cop. In fact, the riot squad often leaves an escape route to let rioters run past the squad. The officers can adopt a passive position, in which they spread out and leave several yards between each officer. The crowd can then easily filter through them. If a particularly violent group moves toward the officers or they spot specific suspects they want to arrest, they can quickly close the gaps and form a tight line.

As the unit moves forward into a crowd, it will prod and push at anyone who doesn't [exhibit proper submission and obeisance postures] by the time the front echelon reaches them. If they still refuse to move, the unit continues moving forward, but the front echelon opens up and passes around the protestors. Once the protestors are inside the square, the unit stops, the front echelon reforms and the arrest team processes the rioters. When they're done, the unit can continue moving."

Sometimes, these peace legions of the homeland will not be able to hear each other. Or, for reasons both mysterious and re-searchable on the as of yet uncensored internet, they will find their radio transmissions disrupted, and will need to use a series of fairly universal hand gestures, to coordinate the deployment of their peace and safety cohorts of justice:

Whatever the destination, even a not-wealthy traveler, especially one who has no interest in tourism, can with the minimum of expense enhance his or her experience while simultaneously undertaking a journey the tale of which will be far better than any mere distraction.

This public service announcement brought to you by the colors red and black.

Blankets

2011-11-16T20:48:00.008-05:00

...are like flashlights. You can never have enough of them.

This is a favorite kind of flashlight:

It's an invaluable tool. You should store it with your spade, and the hand held garden weeder you brought along to help do your part in tending the greenery of a public park. Take some care with that garden weeder. You should never, for example, pretend that your hands have been magically transformed into bear claws. That would just be silly:

But, we were discussing flashlights. Where and whenever it can be acquired for little to no cost, grab a flashlight. Or two. Or twenty. I hear that large big box retailers keep them in bulk supply. Those same retailers do not pay their employees very well, and routinely mistreat them as a matter of handbook policy. Mistreated and poorly paid employees make for porous operations. And unguarded stockrooms. Remember to buy those employees lunch. They deserve it.

A large metal flashlight, or torch as some folks are wont to call them, provides its user with a number of options when she finds herself in close quarters with the armed staffers of municipal, state and federal crisis response units. A sufficiently long torch makes an excellent impromptu baton stopping device. Gripping both ends of the light, place it out and away from your head, the better to deflect incoming blows. When appropriate, an experienced user needs only hold one end. She should take care to observe her surroundings. One's allies have not asked to be introduced to the business end of a torch.

The torch has another key defensive use, especially employed in large numbers during night time encounters with uniformed agents of the ruling class. It shines a light. A number of them shone directly into the eyes of advancing cohorts may provide a moment's essential respite, especially when attempting to provide cover for friends and comrades trying to avoid introduction to the peace legions of the homeland. They also illuminate faces, and nameplates, which is useful when taking photographs.

When bracing a flashlight against the swing of a baton, it serves to be wearing gloves. Gloves insulate against the cold. It is more difficult to handcuff a person wearing mittens or gloves. Gloves also absorb some of the shock of unexpected impacts. Well padded gloves might impede the performance of tasks which require dexterity, but they add a layer of protection against injury. Especially useful are gloves with shock absorbing or force distributing material sewn to the outward facing surfaces.

Gloves also provide additional comfort when leaning upon crutches.

Crutches:

...are made of metal, usually aluminum, wood and/or plastic. Like flashlights, crutches are multipurpose tools. A crutch helps the wounded walk. Crutches can be held in front of one's self or others, as part of a theater or comedy routine. It would be entirely incidental should that performance occur during a period of unrest, and just happen to block a number of purely random blows from batons, or nightsticks - defensively of course. Not that you would ever need to do that. Still, a row of persons in danger of harm might find two or more dozen crutches an effective temporary barrier against those aforementioned baton blows. Crutches can also be held while wearing gloves. In circumstances where the crutch might accidentally be put to a secondary use, metal or wood ones will probably hold up better than plastic against repeated blows.

When not immediately necessary, either to provide support for the injured, or defense against injury causing blunt instruments, remember to secure your crutches in a safe, accessible place. You could fasten them to a fence, tree or stake with rope. Rope is a material wonder. It has nearly endless applications. But be careful of rope. There are hazards to its improper placement. For example, when tied taut at ankle level, rope trips the unwary. Seemingly chaotic mazes of rope are especially fraught with peril. When pulled tight across narrow paths or roadways, rope can make the passage of bicycles, segway transporters and motorcycles an unpleasant experience for the vehicle operator. Horses often refuse to navigate through rope barriers. Rope can be especially meddlesome if handled improperly. For example, when secured around and through a number of large, unwieldy objects - such as bicycles, crutches, portions of fence and gate, garbage barrels, folding chairs and improperly disposed appliances - rope can inadvertently create a barricade. Barricades prevent the passage of people, material and smaller automobiles. You must therefore be conscientious and careful in the use and handling of rope.

If you are short on rope, there is always recourse to chain. Chain is heavier, which makes it more durable. Chain, unlike rope, is less likely to burn.

If there is any chance of fire, do not store your cooking oil, lamp oil or kerosene in open containers. Kerosene is a versatile lamp and cooking oil. Lamps are not dependent upon proprietary power grids. When using kerosene lamps, it is perhaps best not to swing them from side to side. That would be as uncivilized as using an innocuous tent stake driving hammer in a manner not described in the manual. Also, take care not to throw any lamps in your possession. That would be irresponsible. Thrown lamps might ignite flammable materials. And if you must use rags to wipe up any spilled kerosene, do not dispose of them in breakable containers. Very specifically, do not discard them into containers containing gasoline for your motorbike, diesel fuel for a generator and/or detergents, like dish soap. That would be very, very irresponsible.

When handling kerosene for your lamp, use gloves.

When the weather is mild, or when you do not need to protect yourself against the blows of well armed men in uniforms, you might store your gloves in the pockets of your hooded sweatshirt. A hood is like a hat which is hard to lose. It covers your head and offers some protection for your ears. During inclement weather, larger hoods can be pulled around an exposed face, protecting sensitive facial features, like the nose and eyes, from all manner of environmental irritants. For extra protection, consider sunglasses and a large handkerchief. If you should find your sweatshirt momentarily unnecessary, do not discard it. Like ropes, flashlights and crutches, a durable sweatshirt can be customized to a number of circumstances. If you should happen to have several long poles handy - or, your crutches - two or three sweat shirts will make an excellent makeshift stretcher. Zip your sweatshirt tight, if needed, run the crutches or poles through the arms of your sweatshirts, with the zipper facing downward, and voila, you have a stretcher. Should an extra moment present itself, you could tether the sleeves to your poles or crutches with rope.

Should you run out of sweatshirts, or need them to weather the wind and other irritants, a single blanket is all you will need to fashion a stretcher, travois or other contrivance for the porting of people and material. A blanket, as with rope, must be used with proper care. Left lying about willy-nilly, a blanket can get caught up in the gears of a bicycle. It might accidentally obscure holes in the ground, or conceal items which all reasonable people everywhere refuse to carry on their persons. Or, unsecured blankets can be blown by the wind, right into the faces of perfectly judicious and impartial peace officers who would never, ever mean you harm.

This public service announcement brought to you by the letter C.

Barricades

2011-11-16T12:18:00.002-05:00

Come highly recommended. They won't stop an urban assault vehicle. But, with an eye towards effective placement, they can make it more difficult for armed municipal staffers to effectively use the riot control cohort which allows them to muscle in, Roman Legion style, and pacify a crowd.

Also, and you probably already know this, bonfires. Bonfires rock.

One of the side effects of the militarization of community policing is a growing dependence upon gadgetry. Such as, night vision goggles and infrared cameras. Bonfires create pockets of light which can effectively blind the night vision dependent.

Night vision amplification comes in two types - "image intensification" and "thermal imaging":

Night-vision equipment does not turn night into day.

1) Image intensification systems

Image intensification systems perform poorly in total darkness and more amplification causes visual distortions. By highlighting particular areas it can lead troops to concentrating on the light focus areas and not what is happening in unlit darker areas. Furthermore, they only work effectively over short distances and with slow moving objects. Image intensification rapidly diminishes at distances over 120 metres and the faster and more erratically an object moves, the less it can track it.

Because an image enhancing system works to increase lightness, a bright light shone on it in the near darkness will dazzle or blind its user. Even if the user is moving towards a bright light, and this includes a bright moon low on the horizon, he has great difficulty making out clear images and the equipment also casts long shadows which leads to accidents on uneven terrain. Therefore it can be made to malfunction by shining torches and, especially, by oncoming car headlights.

2) Thermal, infra-red imaging

Thermal imaging cannot be used to identify precise details on remote objects that are not distinguishable by different heat profiles. Depending on the quality of the night goggles, the maximum viewing range is from 30 to 120 metres in perfect conditions, and in adverse weather conditions much less. Weather conditions are the biggest threat to the efficiency of these systems. Dust, sand, smoke, fog, clouds and rain severely reduce their operational effectiveness.

Thermal night-vision equipment is also highly sensitive to red light. Even car instrument screens can disorientate the user and this is even more the case with red-lens flash lights.

A US army study also showed their limits used for night driving. It revealed that two thirds of vehicle accidents were due to night goggles. They proved very prone to terrain and roadway hazards like drop-offs and ditches greater than 1 metre and even with High Mobility Multi-purpose Wheeled Vehicles. This was particularly the case when they faced dusty or sandy conditions and when confronted with smoke or as a result of being dazzled by an external light source.

Finally, the experience of Kosovo and Iraq showed that it is very difficult to wear the special helmets for a long time. They are extremely uncomfortable and the strain on the eyes of viewing things through these goggles means troops can only wear them for short periods and not in longer conflicts. Therefore troops will not be able to wear them throughout the night in surveillance or battle.

You can also pick up an assortment of LED flashlights, with blue and red beams, from as cheap as $2.

This public service announcement brought to you be the letter A.

Community

2011-11-16T09:14:00.000-05:00

We don't watch a lot of television, but my ten year old and I have made a ritual of watching NBC's "Community" and "Parks and Recreation" together. He rather thoroughly enjoys "Community." Yesterday, he found out that NBC would not be returning it to the spring line up. He was sad. Pet fish being flushed down the toilet, or burying the family cat, sad.

Gave me an opportunity to explain to him the problems with depending upon very wealthy people for one's entertainment and amusement. Gave us the space to discuss the consequences of tethering one's enjoyment to the cultural output of a corporatocracy's cult of success - in this instance, as ratings - and growth.

Thank you, NBC. Thank you very much.

Mess

2011-11-15T08:00:00.004-05:00

Disobedience is messy. It's disruptive. That's kind of the point. If engaged in a struggle against those who rule, and who profit from the obedience of the many, it makes no sense to behave. Disobedience is the willingness to be bad, according to the prevailing moral standards required of the ruled by the rulers. It is unruly.

Resistance is planned chaos. To resist a political and economic order, especially one which is hegemonic, is to commit to a mode of life and a set of choices designed to make life miserable for those who profit off that order.

Some people, by temperament or by the assumption of ruling class morality, are not suited to resistance. That is no judgment against them. It is not a stain on their characters. They are not weaker, inferior, less worthy of esteem or deficient in courage. But, perhaps, they should consider their own moral queasiness at the prospect of disruption, sabotage and the messiness of struggle as a sign. As a red flag. Maybe they are better suited to other tasks. Work which is no less important. Collectivity, especially stripped of the fantastic and the angelic, allows for human possibilities approaching the infinite. Isn't that the promise of it - that every person can be as fully human as desire can satisfy? Contending for a more human future will almost surely provide the opportunity for thousands upon thousands of roles and vocations which do not obligate actively disobedient resistance. And during any struggle, those who lack the mien appropriate to engaging in the chaos of conflict are not limited to the roles of spectator, cheerleader and apologist. Food must be grown, found, transported. Wounds healed. Fugitives hid. Children sheltered, cared for, taught. Strikers clothed. Families housed. The list is nearly endless.

Still, there's some value in wondering aloud at those who want a resistance, but refuse to participate in the mess it creates. At those who want to keep their hands clean of the dirt of actual struggle, while they organize into alternative leadership cabals, in order to claim the birthright of that resistance.

It's almost like they're already looking towards a future that looks identical to our today.

Like they want results without doing the work.

Like they want to, hmmm, appropriate the labor of others.

Nothing untoward could come of that...

*

UPDATE:

It's already messy.

"Riot police deployed under cover of darkness at 1 am. No video cameras were allowed during the early hours of the raid. News teams were barred from the scene. Air space above Zuccotti park was shut down.

Above all, a well-prepared removal plan received shock-op back-up as the NYPD rolled out long range acoustic devices (LRADs) on the streets of NY. The device is capable of emitting a tone higher than normal human pain threshold and can permanently damage hearing.

Evidence of LRAD weaponry was captured with cell-phones during the raid against OWS protestors, early morning November 15. This is the first time during the Occupy Wall Street movement that police posed such an extreme threat and begs the question; how long before LRADs are unleashed on the people?"

Here, in part, is why:

Austerity is not "about the economy." It has nothing to with competition, job creation or fiscal solvency. It's not about efficiency. It's not about the commonweal. Austerity is about changing the function of the State back to an older, more versatile, more enduring stable form. Austerity is about preserving the State as a military-policing instrument, whilst shedding those functions which currently provide a buffer against the mastery of the class which controls the state. Where once the ruling class had to buffer the laboring class from the worst excesses of capitalist accumulation, in order to maintain a sufficiently stable and trained laboring population, this condition no longer obtains. The ruling class can, because of globalization and the "offshoring" of plant capacity to crippled and re-colonized "third world" nations, now return to a more traditional set of relations with labor and the growing lumpenproletariat.

The modern nation state [and the large metropolitan corporate fiefdoms which increasingly constitute its power centers and dominate its politics]..remains vital as a buffer against direct opposition to exploitation, absorbing the violence, outrage and justified anger of laborers and the dwindling classes of petty small holders. For an American example, see the Tea Party. Or liberal political advocacy organizations.

But, for the nation state to serve this function, and with any degree of efficiency, it must shed either its excess populations, its welfare capacity or some of both. In the US, we have a very successful prison industry, as well as the marginalization of foreign and "illegal" workers, to provide a species of population shedding, since institutionally alienated populations (poor blacks, immigrant Asians and Latinos), subject to the control of prisons or deportation, do not immediately threaten the state's field of operation. They instead provide a justification for it, and for the increasing police-militarization of social life. In Israel, see Palestinians. In France, the residents des banlieuses. In Germany, Turks and other immigrants.

Returning to a theme first announced above, the dismantling of the welfare state must either proceed at an increasing pace, so that the state can return to direct management of populations through isolation and violence, thus safeguarding the accumulated assets of the ruling class, or it risks collapsing before those same ruling classes can properly corral subject and captive populations into new zones of control, buffer and instability...

...The ruling class - represented in this age by corporations, military hierarchies, academia and managerial service institutions - has already cast its lot against the Commons as shared public space. It has begun the revaluation of the state, and therefore of social relations, towards the preservation of economic and social advantage in the face of oil contraction, resource scarcity and rising population. Towards this end, deconstructive crisis hastens the project of redefining the Commons as a policed military space, and away from three centuries of construction and agitation for the Commons as commonweal and social amelioration."

Enemies

2011-11-14T08:45:00.001-05:00

So, there was this religious non-violence (written by Starhawk, no less; heh) screed being passed around, reproving folks for failing to act in accord with the creed of non-violence. Demanding a "strategic non-violence" which demonstrated, ultimately, that the posture is a bourgeois one. Was going to write a critique.

Realized the violent crackdowns on Denver, Oakland and Portland Oregon spoke volumes, instead.

All that non-violence, and the cops were still sent in to swing their batons.

ADDED in edit: Heh. This post addresses the positions taken by Starhawk and her associates. Starhawk is a widely published spiritualist, somewhat famous also for once being in a relationship with a (now) defrocked Theilhardian Catholic priest. Starhawk is not poor. Starhawk, from what I gather, is actually rather well off. Book sales can do that for a person.

It does not address every single person who thinks "non-violence" has tactical value. It addresses "moral non-violence" and "spiritual non-violence," the sort common to bourgeois property owners who've projected their concerns for the loss of property outward on to other forms of property.

Business

2011-11-11T11:27:00.010-05:00

This is how business sees opposition. This is how business is done:

"In his forum called 'Designing a Media Relations Strategy To Overcome Concerns Surrounding Hydraulic Fracturing,' Range Resources communications director Matt Pitzarella explains how to 'overcome stakeholder concerns' surrounding fracking.

'We have several former psy ops folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments,' Pitzarella said. 'Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that understanding of psy ops in the Army and in the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.'

It was during Anadarko Petroleum's manager of external affairs, Matt Carmichael's, session on 'Understanding How Unconventional Oil & Gas Operators are Developing a Comprehensive Media Relations Strategy to Engage Stakeholders and Educate the Public' that he suggested his colleagues:

'Download the U.S. Army-slash-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, because we are dealing with an insurgency,' Carmichael said. 'There’s a lot of good lessons in there and coming from a military background, I found the insight in that extremely remarkable.'

To be clear on exactly what Carmichael meant when he said they're 'dealing with an insurgency' we obtained a copy of the FM 3-24 — the final edition of the 2006 Counterinsurgency manual provided to psy ops soldiers. We substituted the word government with corporation.

' ... insurgency has been a common approach used by the weak to combat the strong. At the beginning of a conflict, insurgents have the strategic initiative ... the insurgents generally initiate the war. They may strive to disguise their intentions, and the potential counter-insurgent will be at a great disadvantage until [corporate] leaders recognize that an insurgency exists and are able to determine its makeup and characteristics to facilitate a coordinated reaction.

While the [corporation] prepares to respond, the insurgent is gaining strength and creating increasing disruptions throughout the state. The existing [corporation] normally has an initial advantage in resources, but that edge is counterbalanced by the requirement to maintain order. The insurgent succeeds by sowing chaos and disorder anywhere; the [corporation] fails unless it maintains order everywhere.'..."

The treatment of captive populations as either adherents (consumers) or potential guerrillas is not limited to the "bad" corporations. Banks, newspapers, defense contractors and oil companies may have hired the first ex-military experts in disinformation, population control and psychological warfare, but they won't be the last. A permanent military devoted to endless warfare produces experts who generally leave service sometime before they die.

Doing business, even small business, requires mystification. Business is unfair. Always. Doing business means separating a person from the product of her labor, to her repeated disadvantage. Grocery chains, gas stations, restaurants, amusement companies, counseling practices, engineering firms - they all develop media relations departments once they pass a critical mass of wealth, market presence and accumulation.

Once a business is capable of moving the market, it reinforces this capability.

It begins to understand consumers - or, patients and clients - as potential traitors. As persons in need of loyalty and brand reinforcement.

This is, not incidentally, how the corporate press sees the rest of us as well. If you do not respond to their product as would a loyal consumer, you are treated as an insurgent, or potentially so. The larger portion of news output depends upon the treatment of the listener, viewer or reader as a person who might otherwise be hostile should the narrative fail

You, who are probably a producer of commodities or commoditized services, must act like a commodity yourself. As an item on shelf, dependable in its branding. That is the how the producers of news segments, ad campaigns and state propaganda understand you, us, the whole lot of competing captive populations. We are energy and wealth producing possessions with enough of a smattering of will to potentially resist, or to seek new conditions.

Considerable treasure and loot is budgeted towards getting us to "internalize" a consumptive form of obedience, to better prevent resistance which works.

You've learned about how Gandhi was a great man, no doubt. How his non-violence was like a kind of solar magic which enervated a nation. How India emerged from his spectral man-womb, perfectly formed from pure and noble protest, from the holy reception of British violence. That Gandhi gets taught in school. Gandhi the child fondler, the racist, the man who ordered his wife's death by refusing her medicine, the guy who nearly starved himself to death to stop Congress Party from giving rights to the Untouchables - he doesn't make it into the hagiographies, the history books, the school texts or the PBS retrospectives. The Real Gandhi makes Permissible Gandhi look like, um, propaganda*.

And like most of us who were fed this pig's swill of educational and moral self-betrayal, you might not even be aware of the thousands and tens of thousands of Indians who sabotaged train tracks, burned out British and local police stations, assassinated officers and engaged in what is now commonly referred to as hateful, evil, immoral "terrorism." They probably even vandalized park benches, broke windows and burned out collaborating businesses.

The real Gandhi, and the historical India are continuously elided, in favor of the non-violent Saint and his loyal millions of lightworking do-gooders.

"Gandhi-ji" good, actually hurting those with all the power and guns, bad. Bosses with smiles on their faces because the rube proles are waving placards and playing with poppets, good. Banks empty of customers because the lobby, designed to look like the interior of a temple, is on fire, bad.

Kind of like: Martin good, Malcolm bad.

Or: Obama cool and articulate, McKinney nappy haired craaaay-zee.

This "internalization" of self-defeating, action-limiting beliefs operates from within and without. Those people who fancy their selves as members of a resistance, but who have incorporated the over-class's obeisances, mental obstructions, consensus mentality and rule making hierarchies into their memories operate from within a movement, constantly (if most likely, unconsciously) reinforcing the imposition of the masters' rules and restrictions on conduct, reinforcing those pressures which are routinely applied from without. Those within a resistance, especially those most prone to propertarian convictions, will often attempt to assume ownership over the messaging, "optics" and moral fiber of that resistance, movement or protest. They will insist on decorum. They will demand a respect (a fetish, actually, but who's nitpicking?) for property and its sacral functions, its usefulness, its value. It is important to them that the correct owners of the resistance be established. That it have the right brand. They are branded by the corporate and educational cultures which generally tend to produce them, and their pursuit of brand awareness, brand placement and brand protection reflects these facts.

They do the work of the ruling class, of course.

They are not alone in performing this task.

Huffington, Yahoo, MSNBC, CNN, the networks and FOX have run daily pieces on the precipitous state of Iran's "nuclear ambitions" for the last week or so. We are being prepped for the possibility of one more expansion of the endless war to keep global, Western capitalism - managed from London, New York, Washington, Berlin, Paris and Rome - afloat atop a rising tide of manufactured Emergency and storyboarded crisis.

Emergency is the answer to insurgency. Crisis is the reaction to criticism.

This is now business as usual. Same as it ever was.

h/t Xymphora

* - because Permissible Gandhi is fucking propaganda. Seriously, this fuck was a child fondling defender of forced chastity, female servitude, racial superiority and the hatefulgodsbedamned caste system. Also, it's no hard task to draw a line of causation from Gandhi to Nehru to Gandhi to nuclear India.

Warning Label

2011-11-10T13:00:00.002-05:00

If the person opposite an argument or discussion insists on the non-violence of [insert ennobled and revered fakir with a redline to the Allfather or the Everysoul] it might do well to remember that prayer, meditation, magicking and munificent thoughts do not actually alleviate squalor, stop the policeman's baton from completing its arc of brutality, or prevent a rapist from doing his rapey worst.

The appeal to the non-violence of sainted or holy prophets reveals the speaker for someone more interested in preserving his or her own presumed moral integrity than in opposing and ending the abuses which follow from concentrations of power and wealth. This person is therefore committed to a path of earthly or divine salvation; in other words, to the redemption of a treasured, special self from the sins of the world. He or she is likely to abandon those without grace, and to justify that abandonment with an appeal to non-violence. It is not difficult to believe that these advocates of non-violence regularly end up betraying their own movements, because, in the end they also believe those too sinful or morally impure to seek a holy and harmonious estate of union with right living deserve the sordid fate of a dirty, quotidian world of starvation, venality and agony - one which is ruled by the violent, as a punishment for violence. Following this logic of holiness to its verbal limits, those impure enough to resist with passion, to strike back, or to seek temporary and tactical advantage deserve to be written off for their surrender to contingency. It is a meted fate, and a merited one.

When the man who wields the baton, and the one who orders him to swing it, eventually get around to putting an end to unrest, the elect, identifiable by the sweaty stink of holy non-violence about their persons, will make their usual mewling sounds. They might even shed tears whilst they cluck their tongues at the dirty youths who brought violence upon themselves by falling from the grace of a perfect peacefulness.

They will safeguard their souls, and their good brand, leaving the dirty and impure work of actually resisting the powerful to people upon whom they heap their worst scorn. After claiming an inherently propertarian and capitalist title to the high ground, to the arbitration of right conduct, and to the soul and the purity of a movement, they will betray it to preserve their own salvation and the imagined redemptive qualities of their presence. They believe, these lesser prophets of a holy man's non-violence, that their bodies sacralize the shared space of resistance. Their mission is apostolic.

They make it holy. And that makes them one more iteration of the bourgeois, "middle class" interloper descending upon the victims of capital with a new set of tablets of the law, seeking not retribution and recompense, but converts to their faith. Armed with that faith, they believe that institutional violence can be undone with magic. They believe in presence, that the presence of saints in the chambers of power will redeem that power. When it comes to an accounting, they don't want to strike at power. They don't want to injure the beast. They want to capture it. They want to redeem it. They want to hold it in their sacred embrace, and to affirm their faith by restoring it to good and sainted purpose. They want affirmation, they want others to have mirrors for faces.

*

The great thing about mirrors is that when you break them, you get dozens of cutting edges.

Feast Day

2011-11-09T10:55:00.003-05:00

Was going to write another one of those serious posts. Will later. Let my inner discordian out, instead. Because I just finished reading another screechy foray into lightworker heroism.

Fucking heroes.

Does anyone, anywhere, anywhen actually enjoy the company of a fucking hero? (And by "anyone," I don't mean the rest of yon lightworking, do-gooding, democratizing tetchers busy grumbling about the kids on the lawn.) Fucking reflected glory all getting in your eyes. Who needs that shit?

Anyway.

I'd like to introduce you to a not-hero of mine. Today is his feast day, though you probably didn't know it until right now. Today, the ninth of November, we commemorate - nay, we celebrate - the memory of an accidental friend of human liberty.

He was not, in keeping with the theme of things, a good man. But you can't trust good men. They're always trying to fix people. And, their loathing for dark corners, cobwebs, dust bunnies and frailty is frightening, when you really get down to it. Scratch away at the chrome what coats a good man's life, and underneath you'll almost always discover a violator.

Not the window breaking teenager who scares good capitalists pretending to be radicals because she rejects their greedy ownership of consensus. I mean, the maximalist kind. The totalizers. The fuckers with systems, a list of proscriptions, a book of prescriptions, and a sippy cup of moraline always in grasping, clutching hand.

A good man is always a rapist in the waiting. He wants penetrating insights. He wants you to have 'em as well. He wants to penetrate your life and fill you up with the holy semen of his enlightenment. He wants to spear you with the truth. He wants to lance the very flesh of history with his righteousness.

No. You can't really trust good men, can you? Especially the ones with who come with tablets of the law and other systems.

Hmph.

Today is not the feast day of a good man. He was better than that, though we should be clear that he was not an improvement.

Today, we commemorate a friend of the despised, the trod upon and the forgotten. It's just too bad that there weren't more of him. One of them might have got to Johnson, as well. Or Kissinger. It's all good. We don't have to be choosy. We can indulge ourselves with an expansive amenability.

It's a feast day, don't you know?

And since this is not a day dedicated to one of the thousand and one faces of sky-god, cattle king, serpent* killing Dyeus Piter - lord of the holy rape and the lightning penetration - you can do whatever you want. Whatever. As in, anything. Your level worst, if you've got it in you. I recommend the strategic placement of aerosol dispersing canisters of sheep urine in your local financial district, timed to produce maximum mist during the lunch hour. Or, lacking that concentration of brokers and bankers, there's always the option of redecorating an executive's prized automobile with a mixture of bovine placental ejecta and gumdrops. There are so many possibilities, we're dealing with chaos here.

It's up to you.

If you can spare a moment, maybe during a sales projections meeting, or when the drive through car line is at it's noontime longest, or at the exact moment your boss is about to ask you to stay on after your scheduled shift ends, or whilst being lectured on productivity goals, or as your human resources rep is about to have you sign off on the latest revised conduct policy, remember to say, in whatever tone, and with whatever volume suits you and the moment best, "Thank Oswald!"

Because, really, thank Oswald. A truer friend of the dispossessed than a hundred hundred workers in light...

* - woman, natch

Gate, Kept

2011-11-06T20:14:00.005-05:00

It's healthy, I think, to resist the urge to prescribe for the various "Occupy" groups a formal or universal method in dealing with their circumstances, especially when done from a distance, or remove.

It is perhaps as vital to avoid treating the various Occupations as if they were related expressions of a coherent, organized, national movement.

In Oakland, the people associated with the "Occupy" name have coordinated with local longshoremen to call for and attempt to organize strikes, port shutdowns, obstructions of shipping and work stoppages. Others in the Oakland group have helped a homeless assistance organization in occupying vacant tenements, as well as come to the aid of a local homeless squat which was under police assault.

In New York, where it all started, but where there is also an extraordinary concentration of wealth, media influence and attention, they have drumming circles and visits from famous people alongside efforts to hold Zuccotti park, resist pressure from the city and police, and avoid co-option.

Occupy is, significantly, an urban phenomenon, and its various groups respond differently to their local circumstances, and to constraints of official austerity and economic contraction. In New York, where the national news organizations are headquartered, Occupy Wall Street's participants' methods reflect both the scrutiny of that media, and the response to its ubiquity. New York City is a metropolis in the camera's eye. And for all that is the center of the media and banking universe, the original Occupy group's main function is largely to symbolize a refusal to adhere to the financial order which has impoverished not only North America, but the world. New York's Occupiers are reduced, if you will, to making their case to hostile cameras, and the cold concrete and steel curtain of Manhattan's financial district. Tucked in an obscure park, largely unknown to the world until early autumn of 2011, Occupy Wall Street's basic mode of resistance is persistence.

Any plan to organize for or attempt sabotage, violent resistance or spontaneous strikes, there at the beating poisoned heart of the world's financial leviathan, would condemn the New York Occupiers to summary judgment, and along with them, most of the others around the country associated in name. It would, from a tactical perspective, give New York City's police and government, the State of New York and the Obama Justice Department the pretext for treating with Occupy as if it were the New Black Panthers.

But, these same conditions do not automatically obtain for the Occupants in Oakland, Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago or the smaller cities which have manifested visible resistance to austerity, financial abuses and state policy. And they certainly do not apply to those regions where Occupy groups can not take hold, especially in small communities and rural environments dominated by strong county and municipal structures, lower population concentration and police who are generally unsullied by the taint of abuse common to larger urban police forces.

There are, for example, only about three hundred police officers in my own home city of Manchester, NH. But they have a more effective control of the local population (about 100k) than the many thousands of police in New York City have over the five boroughs. There are no unions to speak of in Manchester (one of the largest having been effectively broken by Verizon early in the last decade), and the small growing immigrant community is without any heft of note. The city is business friendly, NH is a "right to work" state, and law enforcement enjoys respect, traditional welcome and even acclaim. The few ongoing attempts to "Occupy Manchester" have met with ridicule, scorn and a large and immediate police presence. Few people have the leisure or spare change to engage in any Occupy efforts, and those with the time and money (especially in the surrounding and far more affluent bedroom communities of Bedford, Hooksett, Amherst, New Boston, Goffstown, Londonderry, Derry and Litchfield) more often than not identify with NH's flavor of bourgeois libertarianism, or a stricter party adherence to the business and banking favorable GOP.

Occupy is a metropolitan reaction to urban conditions, and to the media and corporate environments which provide metropoles with culture, identity, wealth and cohesion.

It will not take root, in this form, in those social and material environments which lack the clustering of wealth, power, mediation and leisure common to cities.

That doesn't mean the Occupy name, or its general message of dissatisfaction with banks and state policy, is lost on those who live in smaller or rural polities.

As a heading, as a means of expressing discontent, as a way of relating individual resistances to a larger, visible and communicable trend, Occupy is perhaps the most noteworthy and compelling development in conscious and unconscious anti-capitalism since the 1960s. People identify with Occupy.

And while it's not a coordinated and deliberately anti-capitalist movement, Occupy is versatile enough to encompass the direct action, labor and housing oriented agitation in Oakland and the original and perhaps less coherent or results oriented Occupy Wall Street. And we should do well to remember that it has spread to other countries, including but not limited to England, New Zealand and Australia.

Which is why there have been repeated efforts to bundle up the fervor, discontent and unrest associated with the various manifestations of Occupy and channel it toward electoral politics or reformism. This might also explain the efforts of conservative gatekeepers, notably Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh, to regale their listening audience of dissatisfied working conservatives with stories of perversion, filth, venality, criminality and the specter of Bolshevism, all conveniently associated with not only the Occupy groups, but with Barack Obama as their class warrior figurehead.

As importantly, Occupy's broad appeal has motivated powerful liberals to attempt to constrict its scope as part of their broader bid to hijack the label towards Democratic Party "optics," "framing" and ends.

Chief among these turnpike guards are Michael Moore - a famous and fabulously wealthy 1%er himself, but one prone to use the word "we" to describe OWS - and Rachel Maddow, as best illustrated by the following exchange (reported lovingly and approvingly by Crooks and Liars):

MADDOW: Aside from the common issues, the common complaints that you are describing, that our systems ought to work for somebody other than just the richest Americans; both our political system and our economic system. Aside from that issue, it seems like there are some tactical things that are in common here, even if there isn't a big top down organizing movement. There's people using, the people's microphone when they have a large crowd.

There's people doing... making decisions and meeting by general assembly, which is a basically consensus based discussion where everybody gets together and comes to a decision that everybody can live with. I wonder if you're seeing that, a) if you're seeing those tactics everywhere and b) if there are splits emerging?

I mean as you know in Oakland yesterday there was a very successful general strike, a very successful all day long basically peaceful until after midnight when there was basically rioting and the Occupy Oakland people essentially disavowing the people who were rioting. Are you seeing difficult discussions about non-violence and about potential splits and differences and tactics?

MOORE: Well, yes and no. Everyone I've spoken to is committed 100 percent to non-violence, that this is the only way that this is going to work. In fact we don't need violence because we're not in the minority here. This is the majority. This is a majority movement. If this country is of, by and for the people if it's to run by the will of the majority, there's no need for violence, because the majority have already said, “We're sick and tired of this and we expect some changes.”

I think in Oakland there's a very specific, in terms of the violence there, Oakland has a long history of police abuse, of how the black community has been treated... they just have one of the worst... I mean, literally, it's almost in the DNA of how Oakland is structured in their City Hall and their police and it doesn't seem to matter who the mayor is, they just can't deal with its basic problems. I think that has a lot to do with it.
But you're also going to have groups who come in wanting to co-opt this movement, whether it's slick politicians that want the endorsement of what they think is a liberal “tea party”, or anarchists or others who don't like the non-violence approach and want some form or violence. But my experience, and I've been around since the anti-Vietnam War days, is that generally... and I told the crowd this over at Denver here just an hour ago... if you see someone trying to incite violence, start with the assumption that that person is an undercover Homeland Security or cop or whatever, because this is the history of America where those in charge have tried to ignite people, incite them to commit acts of violence; and I tell them, don't be incited. Just assume right away that person is not part of the Occupied movement if that's what they're calling on people to do.

(emphasis original)

What Moore is doing is neither particularly clever, nor original. It is in fact the bluntness of his appeal to pacifism, reform, and toothlessness which deserves our attention. He is admirably assisted by Maddow in this effort, as she frames her question as an either/or which can only allow for one acceptable response. For Maddow, those who have attempted actions which are not wholly symbolic have "split" away from the right and true message. It should not surprise us that Moore sticks to the script, obliging her in his reply by characterizing violence, active resistance, direct action and deeds which are not wholly symbolic as untrustworthy examples of police provocation.* Moore doesn't just assert this, he states it plainly: any act which is not "non-violent" has been undertaken by the police to embarrass the real Occupy Wall Street, which conveniently mirrors the meliorism of rich, comfortable men like Moore. Moore, who's as slick a political operator as Bill Clinton, warns Maddow and her listeners against the twin bete noirs of the modern liberal, anarchists and slick politicians.

Yes, that Michael Moore. The one who campaigned for warmongering Wesley Clark and the Lord of Sky Death Robots himself, Barack Obama. The man who is still in Obama's camp. A cheer leader for Obama and the Democrats. Michael Moore, the guy who wants to co-opt the Occupy message towards regulatory tinkering ("some change"), electoralism and ultimately the same captive institutional liberalism which has already been bought up, lock stock and barrel, by the bankers and capitalists Moore purports to oppose only as long as he's making movies which have earned him millions of dollars in capital and a capitalist's lifestyle.

Moore declares that violence itself violates the so-called will of the majority, a will he asserts but conveniently fails to demonstrate. This is to be expected from a social-compacter. He treats with riots as events which must be disavowed, and he waggles his finger at the very notion that those who are not toothlessly pacific could ever represent a valid approach to the depredations of the powerful. For Moore, Maddow and other progressive gatekeepers, the majority exist to give their consent to the social contract. For liberals like Moore, "the people" and "the majority" serve a sacramental function. They give their holy, collective blessing to the state of society. When the rich and powerful become "corrupted," the people exist to signal to their leaders that a period of renewal and purification should be observed until the body politic has been restored to its true and blessed estate, reforms have been discussed and occasionally implemented, and a sacred balance has been struck between the consent vesting majority and those who have been given the holy duty of leading and shepherding them.

That is why, for liberals like Moore and Maddow (and especially those who serve as gatekeepers), the only appropriate action for the people, the only unfolding of events to which they ascribe any merit, is that which is symbolic. For Moore, standing at the gate with his hand on the handle, violence threatens that sacramental relationship between shepherd and sheep.

Violence on its own right is neither moral nor immoral, just or unjust. Nor is every instance of violence identical to every other. Violence is not fungible. It is not always aggression. It's not even always clearly defined as such.

When a man strikes a woman across the face, he's done violence to her. When she stabs him in the chest, she has returned violence. When a parent refuses to feed a child - even if he never strikes her - he has done violence to her. When she breaks a window to escape, she has responded with violence.

It serves our earthly rulers to differentiate between "violence," which they criminalize, and all the other acts of violence which are their ordinary methods of accumulating wealth and power, and enforcing it. That they call these violent deeds by such names as policing, policy, law enforcement, education, politics, business practice, rent, insurance or treatment is no small matter. It serves their purposes to have us believe that our violence is criminal, but theirs is the natural and inexorable order of the world.

And it serves the purposes of a man like Michael Moore to internalize that ruling class false dichotomy and demand that those who are discontented with the system abide by its rules and jurisdictions as well. Because, frankly, Michael Moore is the ruling class, as much so as Barack Obama or Georgie Boy Bush.

So much so, perhaps, that when you hear a man tell you that active resistance, sabotage, rioting, violence and actions which break with the sacramental canon of empty gestures and impotent symbolism are inherently wrong, you can assume he's working the gate and he isn't looking to let you get free.

h/t Red Queen (for the inspiration)

h/t Singularity ("a valid assumption")

h/t American Leftist (for the squat info)

* - as the history of COINTELPRO and the police infiltration of the SDS, the Black Panthers and more recently the Seattle Anti-WTO groups can attest, the police obviously do provoke. That alone is no reason to immediately eschew violence. Violence is not always tactically applicable. But, as the span of history's record reveals, the ruling class doesn't give ground unless frightened. They should therefore never, ever have a moment's respite. Unless it's to lull them into false confidence and passivity...

Recipe

2011-11-06T08:18:00.010-05:00

Recipe:

5 - 1000+ people
1 shared space or project
Competing needs and desires
Ego
$500, 000 (or more)

Mix together in a privately owned park. Heat at ambient temperature. Plate cold.

Serves six.

*

Once a group begins to define its actions by the limited resource of consensus money, once currency recreates the conditions of scarcity in the distribution of those resources, you also get scarcity in the redistribution of influence and social relations. Scarcity makes power. The people with the power to distribute the money, the resources, the satisfaction of needs, the security - they band together. And then they use some of the take to protect their ability to control it. The replication, again and again, of the stable form of power.

Introduce money* (which is formalized scarcity), get a hierarchy.

Want a human community in resistance to end up looking like the society or group it opposes?

Send 'em money.

* - credit is money, see Graeber ("What is debt?") in links to the right

Food

2011-11-05T13:46:00.002-04:00

You want a revolution to succeed, over the long term? Or to at least have a fighting chance?

Worry less about "voluntarism" or the proper moral context for sabotage, obstruction and strikes. Care not one wit about what actions will or will not anger the police, unless and only as a matter of tactics. Eschew the philosophy of the right historical moment. Abandon any hope of salvaging academia, or the liberal vanguard.

Get a hold of food. Good, healthy food. And learn how to store it, to move it, to get it to hungry people.

Strikes, sabotage, obstruction matter. Tactics matter. Surveying the landscape - economic and actual - matters. But it's all shit if you ain't got food you can count on.

And right now, the rest of us don't have any that's ours, that we can really count on. Do we?

Listen

2011-11-03T12:06:00.002-04:00

[If you don't want to read about the evil that men do to women, please stop reading.]

Close to thirteen years ago, I took a transfer from one retail location to another. The transfer was itself a promotion, and for the first time in several years, I was back to managing an operation for people who were considerably higher on the food chain than my own self.

After wearing myself ragged in a prolonged custody dispute the effects of which can still be felt today, I was in debt to the tune of two hundred dollars an hour to my esteemed attorney. Don't get me wrong, she was, using currency as a replacement value, worth every penny, nickel, dime, quarter, dollar, fin, sawbuck and franklin spent on her. She wasn't the first feminist I'd ever met, but she was the first one who was neither twenty, nor affiliated with a university. She was also the first lawyer with whom I spoke who was willing and able to conduct the case without drawing my ex's sexual character into question. Let's just say, the dudes wanted to make a mash of her sex. My attorney, who'd spent most of her life prior to getting her permission to practice law doing juvenile intervention as a JSO case officer, wanted us to stay out of court except to present the judge with a done deal. So, we went for a stipulated agreement, shared custody, with a presentation on my part to pay child support directly to my ex- for every week in which she had physical custody. I also agreed to provide insurance, and we hashed out religious, extended familial, educational and medical agreements.

It looked like we're about to put to rest a year of animosity, bad blood, flights from the area, improper custodial departure and the residue of a horrendous break up, in which no parties were without fault; a conflict which made none of us the better, nor the wiser.

Then my ex- did something very stupid in a very public way on a very busy street and found herself a guest of the authorities. And I was, by order of the judge, now a full custodial parent. My ex-, and rightfully, tried to fight the judge's order. The judge didn't budge, so we came back with another stipulated agreement which recognized the custodial order, but which still provided my ex- with a three and half consecutive days of every week visitation, and equal say in medical, moral, religious and educational decisions. It recognized the prior agreement in all but letter, but which now established me as the parent with physical custody in accord with the judge's intent.

All of which cost me the pretty pennies, nickels, dimes, et cetera, mentioned above. I needed more money, so I took the training, the promotion, and three months later, the new location.

What I inherited with the bump in pay, and (finally!) full medical, were two ladies in their seventies, a drunk, a boyfriend and a girlfriend team, and a satanist. The drunk kept it off hours, the satanist was a fantastic third shifter, and the ladies rocked; both of them stayed with me for years, one later eventually (after much overcoming of her objections) agreeing to become the AM, and eventually assume management of her own location.

The couple, though...

The couple provided me with my first abject failure as a "manager." And I blew it. I mean, it's still legendary. Years later, at a sexual harassment and conflict management seminar provided in house, I got to hear the story again, this time told as teaching example. I was being used to teach new recruits, "anonymously" of course.

When I took over the location, the couple - let's call them Ned and Karen - worked all the same hours together. They had exactly identical shifts. I thought it inconvenient, but being a stupid man, this set off none of the red flags it would have in perhaps 95% of the women who find themselves in similar positions.

Like I said, it was just inconvenient. So after a few weeks, I rewrote the schedule. They had a few shifts together, but I also gave them different hours. And Sundays off, for church.

Karen pleaded with me to put it back the way it was before. Pleaded. I, again being a truly stupid man, mistook her desperation for something else. Selfishness. Young love. Immaturity. I explained, in what I'm now sure was a condescending tone, but which at the time seemed like good paternal concern, that the schedule wasn't written just for her benefit.

Again, stupidity was strong in the younger Jack.

She broke down, physically, visibly, emotionally. I think about it now as I type, and I recall it like she folded in upon herself, making of her skin a mobius strip. Her presence seemed to shrink, to recede.

I tell you now, I had no clue what I'd done. Objectively, I'd made the schedule fairer. Realistically, I had put Karen's life in real and immediate danger.

Because Ned was, to put it bluntly, always on the verge of killing Karen. And Karen's method of staying out of the way of Ned's fists, and the other things he did with his large body when he was angry - vile, terrible things - was to always, always be with Ned. To keep him soothed, negated, placated and sexually satisfied. Karen was also pregnant, a fact she'd discovered to her horror and her bewildered joy not long before young, idiot Jack became her boss and the man who placed her closer to death than anyone but big man Ned.

Ned did not handle the scheduling change with anything approaching grace, aplomb or good will. He threatened me. He literally puffed out his chest, and tried to back me into a corner. I - altogether now, because young Jack Was A Very Stupid Man - did not make the connection between Ned's willingness to loom over and threaten me with Karen's desperation.

I thought Ned was just being a dick for not getting to work all the same shifts with his girlfriend.

I thought wrong. You see, I was the same guy who thought that he was being noble and just for not letting a lawyer say bad things about his ex's sexual peccadilloes. I thought I was a good man. I mean I had my flaws. I could yell and fume, when it suited me. I was known to stand up to the provocation of bullies with my own escalation. I'd been in my share of scraps. I'd stolen, burgled and dealt. I'd done bad things, but I'd always had a reason. That reason is important, you know. It gets you through the night. And often enough, it really is legitimate.

But I was a good guy. You know, like give me a medal, man, for never being a raping raper. Or for not caring about who gave whom else what orgasm.

Anyway, I'm sure 99% of all women could have predicted what came next. As I could barely see the problem before me, I was ill equipped to envision what was about to happen.

Ned turned Karen into his fist receptacle. Ned was sure Karen was fucking...me. Ned was sure Karen was fucking the Satanist. Ned was sure Karen was giving blow jobs to every male customer. Ned was sure about a lot of things. Ned was scary when he was certain.

But, I didn't know this yet.

Karen and Ned didn't come to work for a couple of days. Which was very inconvenient for me. Because I ended up working their shifts. On the second day, I called them more than once to remind them. On the third I threatened their jobs. On the fourth, Ned came to work. But, not Karen.

I was happy to have a day off.

I don't know if Karen was still happy to be alive. I've been on the receiving end of beatings, and I couldn't tell you with any honesty that I was happy they were finished. Or that I was relieved. Or possessed of any other emotion requiring the release of serotonin or endorphins.

I'm not going to tell you that I can imagine what Karen felt. I can't. I don't. I won't. I left home to stop the abuse. Karen had no where to go. Her parents weren't going to let "that whore" back in their home. But that comes later.

Karen did return to work. Because she needed the money. Because she could walk from her apartment to our location. Because Ned wanted it that way.

Karen did something brave. And courageous. And bold. She told me what Ned had done to her. She told me that Ned had done worse. She begged me to put the schedule back the way it was. I - do we really need another reminder of my stupidity? - asked her if she wanted to call the cops. If she wanted to go to a shelter. Remember, I was the good guy in my own head. Which made me even more stupid.

Because I didn't hear her. I didn't listen. I was already doing the dudely, and offering to rescue her. I was, because I'm an idiot, or at least was once the signature example of one, inviting her to take a way out I had no ability to actually deliver. I was saying, "hey, you've got options" in my own head. But I was telling her, "hey, you can count on me to be there when you really need it."

It was an implied promise I could not keep.

And I did not keep it, because the next time Ned and Karen were together at work, he backed her up against the wall, in a fit of complete self-absorption and rage. He did it right there, in front of a co-worker (one of the old ladies). She was actually brave enough to put her body between Ned and Karen, and talk him out of the store. Then she made the mistake of calling me. She had no choice but to tell the boss man, but it was still a mistake.

Because I fired Ned. I called him at their apartment and I told him never to come back. I told him that we (yes, the royal fucking we) would call the police if he ever showed up at work again, or if he ever touched Karen in any way in the future.

I heard myself saying, "Fucker, stop it, already."

He heard me saying, "Neener, neener, neener, I'm fucking your girlfriend."

Karen heard the coffin seal tight around her.

While I was filing the paperwork for Ned's termination, and while Karen was still trembling in the older lady's arms, Ned was destroying their apartment, and almost everything Karen owned. Ned also called her parents and told them that Karen was pregnant, he wasn't sure it was his at all, and that she planned to get an abortion. Sealing shut her only way home. Because Ned was good at being the good Christian, when Karen's parents were around. Ned never missed church. Ned, I would learn later, prayed for hours to save Karen from her sinfulness.

So now, because I didn't fucking know how to listen, or observe, or understand what it means to be an abused woman, or any of the damned signs most women can recognize as if by instinct, Karen had no place to go, almost no money with which to go, Ned's handprints on her body, and his baby in her belly. Her parents wanted her to apologize to Ned and make it up to him, to atone for her sinfulness. And to keep her whore body away from the only other place she might go.

I had committed her. I had, by being an average male fool, set her upon a course which was certain to endanger her, and which promised to expose her to the killing result of Ned's unrestrained and jealous rage.

So Karen married Ned. She married him.

And I gave her the weekend off for their "honeymoon." Then Ned filed with the company to get his job back, for wrongful termination. And Karen backed up his story. So we took him back on, and transferred him one store over. Karen put in for the transfer to go with him.

I wish I could tell you that Karen was able to "fix" what I had made so demonstrably worse. Within six months, they'd both gotten themselves fired, the baby was born shortly thereafter, and Ned figured that his girl being a "stupid whore" was reason enough to bugger off and get himself a newer model. Leaving her with a baby, no job and no where to go.

A year or so later, I ran into her cashiering at a local health food store. She looked better. We made polite conversation. She told me about Ned leaving.

I didn't know what to say. I'd been to a few really good sexual harassment seminars, as a matter of corporate penance. (Later, they'd put me charge of teaching them. No. I'm not kidding.) I was still worth the investment, and besides, I was going to be a teaching moment for years to come. Yes, the corporation rolled that episode into its sexual harassment presentations. Not workplace violence. Not sexual assault. Not hostile working environments. Sexual harassment and conflict management. It would be a few more years before they draft working papers for workplace violence education. And a few more before they settled a pattern of conduct lawsuit.

But I still didn't know what to say to Karen. I had a bit more a clue, and I tried to apologize. To her credit, she didn't accept it. I told her about a friend who was hiring, probably for more money than the health food store was paying her. She was smart enough not to make my guilt her problem.

"You didn't listen," she said. And I didn't. I didn't fucking listen. I didn't pay attention.

And I didn't the pay the piper for my failure.

She did.

And that's not the exception, is it?

It's the rule.

It's not going to get better because we men do anything about it. It's not going to get better for women just because some of us figure out how to listen.

It's not going to get better because of us, because of anything we do. We fucked it up. We're still fucking it up.

Listening is what we have to do, just because.

Because we owe.

And we don't get to set terms to how and when we do it.

We just need to listen.

Intransigence

2011-11-02T11:57:00.002-04:00

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.

The middle class, and its college educated managerial all stars, would do well to remember who paid the price for their captive commons, their enduring institutions, and their wholly owned regulatory agencies. They would do well to remember who the various iterations of the state work so hard to contain - hint, they almost never look like the face a middler sees in his Tarjay mirror -, and who they buy up with goodies, tax write offs and public services. They would do well to remember to which class's support staff they actually belong. And why it is the actually poor mistrust them.

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.

It was intransigent people who bought the middle class its breathing space, though they were aiming for something else. They were people who were willing to go up against their class enemies. Red Emma Goldman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Ettore, Johann Most, Mother Mary Harris Jones, Big Bill Haywood and the countless workers, strikers and saboteurs who have no names recorded in the history books - these were intransigent people. They were, for the most part, without the sanction of credentials. They were unsafe. They knew the score, and who was always winning.

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.

Just ask the Black Panthers, what's left of them. Intransigence cost them, surely. The response to the Panthers, by those with political and economic power, should tell all you need to know about the potency of intransigence. To this day, the idea that they might re-form and rise up again is enough to send the middlings into shivers.

Intransigence is not a contemptible trait.

The Fabian experiment failed. Because the state always belongs to those with the wealth. The ruled don't get the government they deserve. The wealthy get the state they've purchased, a state which exists to protect their...property. Because those who own the world are, surprise fucking surprise, intransigent about relinquishing it. They aren't going to be persuaded with polite laws and peaceful protest. These they tolerate, because every fool with a placard or a hotline to the next election is already half in the bag for another set of compromises...

If you're worried about what happens when people think in terms of class enmity, about what happens to all the middling managers, the clerks, the professors of ruling class literature, the people with debt-homes and the lifestyle to which service to the wealthy has made you accustomed - perhaps you know in your heart what side you're really on. Perhaps your liberalism, your adherence to progressive "reform" and your willingness to submit go hand in hand. No doubt you might even accompany your good liberalism with a sneer for those who haven't been so lucky. All under the guise of saving them, of course. That's why you teach the destitute and poor -er, whoops. You don't. You're a more than comfortable professor, or an administrator. You don't understand why the stupidheads aren't agitating for universal university education. I mean like, isn't that just the pinnacle of good living - the security-prurity of academia? It must be because they're all too dumb and ill-fashioned to have your taste in books and the good life. They lack your cultivated aloofness, the silly dears. They have strong needs, instead of a lifestyle.

Perhaps this is all too unforgiving, harsh and intransigent of me. You love the poor and the dirty, surely - from a safe distance. You don't really have a problem with soup kitchens. You might even volunteer at one.

But, doing what it takes to make sure there's no need for soup kitchens? That smells of violence, risk, and the opportunity to lose your good liberal life, doesn't it? And besides, what would you do if you didn't have good little middle class students to teach?

Because, maybe, you're not intransigent. This is your life, right? It's your set of compromises. Nobody should fault you for sticking to them. Honestly. Sincerely. But you're not an improvement upon the human norm. You're just compromised. And being less-compromised isn't an improvement either, for what it's worth. It just sucks more. Poverty sucks. That's why people stress it. It's why we suffer it. It's killing us. It's killing those of us who are actually poor.

It makes you intransigent, living from hand to mouth. It rends you, and renders you.

The problem with the compromisers isn't that they've compromised. It's that their view of the end game is insufficient. It ends up with everyone complicit.

Because...

Taking a knee to avoid the ramifications of actual resistance, safely ensconced in academia, prideful of the number of books about which opinions have been offered, dripping with scorn for those who don't embody or need to apologize for a gambler's debt of affiliations to the status quo, wagging an unscarred, unburned, uncalloused finger at the first indication that actually poor people might visit the middle class with the hatred and disregard due the clerks and condottieri of the too-distant lords of all creation - those are contemptible traits.

Intransigence is not contemptible.

It's what's going to get the rest of us through.

If you don't like that, kindly pick your side already. And stick to it.

* - and before another fuckwit argues that the possession of internet access makes a person an inhabitant of the compromised middle class, we live on less than $23k a year. It's been a decade since we made anything approaching the money which might allow us to do more than just survive. And it's worth mentioning that once a man has been out of work for more than a year, he becomes less and less "viable" as an employee. There are so many others, especially the shits with useless degrees, vying for the same jobs...and they don't have children's schedules around which work time must be fit.

Chomsky's Agonistes

2011-10-31T02:34:00.006-04:00

Some people, apparently, take criticism of Chomsky personally. It's like he's a prophet, or something. It's like criticizing the Chompers is criticizing their own awakening to the banal venality of human endeavors.

This may come as a surprise, but it doesn't take ruling class terminology to figure out that rich people with lots of guns suck.

I know it seems like an epiphany to comfortable, well off technicians plodding along in academia and the suburbs, but it's really not. I don't recommend getting pistol whipped by a cop with a grudge, but it doesn't take a credentialing mill to figure our that the cop is manhandling your carcass because he's got the gun and the backing of the people with the money. It does, on the other hand, help to have comfortable white male skin, a suburban existence, and a college degree to treat with the proposition that "rich people suck hard, which is how they get rich, and then they hire a few poor people to fuck up the rest of the poor to protect their property" as some kind of world-shaking revelation.

Anyhow, I don't understand the impulse to personalize a defense of famous and wealthy people. They are famous and wealthy precisely because they're willing to make the compromises which most of us do not make. Men like Noam may understand the contradiction between writing about bad capitalists and doing so for profit. He may even feel a wee bit of the angst when it comes to staking out an anarchist position from the safety of a military-industrial institute with longstanding ties to the professional torture community. A man like Chomsky may harbor a little shame for regularly outlining the evils of the world order in the driest, most distancing, most academic, and elitist language possible, while routinely using resonant and ordinary idiom to persuade his alleged allies to end actions which might obstruct Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

Here's all you need to know about that man Chomsky, so-called anarchist, so-called radical:

"When teaching at MIT, he often receives undercover police protection."

Now I'm sure Chomsky's Internet Defense Brigade will argue something along the lines of, "But hey, dude, he's like been threatened with death."

To which one might reasonably reply, "And that's nothing like actually dying from an Israeli sniper's bullet, while attempting to cross the street on the way to buying basic foodstuffs at siege and sanctions prices. And besides, there's a fairly clear demarcation between anarchist and comfortable fucking academic who takes death money to teach dolled up Kant-on-the-Brain, all the while writing for-profit tomes about the evils of the profit system. On one side of that line are anarchists, who can be annoying and purist and all sorts of odd and corrosive. On the other side, there are wealthy professors who own more than one home, have investment portfolios and inheritance plans for their children, belong to the ruling class, and accept undercover police protection."

If you're on the side with the undercover police protection, your claims to "anarchism" and opposition to the concentration of power are suspect, at best.

So, what is Chomsky, then?

Chomsky is a gatekeeper.

Like Elizabeth "I laid the foundation for OWS" Warren, Michael "OWS happened because of my movies" Moore or that posturing fascist assclown, Zizek. Their purpose (and there's no coordinated conspiracy here; it's just what they do) is to misdirect outrage into runnels of sophistry and philosophizing, or into party politics.

On the way to burning out the toll stations, perhaps it might be worth showing these gatekeepers the appropriate lengths of rope. Metaphorically, of course...

Safe For Business

2011-10-27T22:25:00.003-04:00

The Huffington Post's front page, as of 9:53 pm, October 27, 2011 EST:

From the Linkins opinion piece:

"...Over at The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof has enunciated an excellent defense of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, aimed at dispelling the notion that the Occupiers are some single-minded mass movement targeting the capitalist system for destruction. In fact, Kristof says, 'while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a 'mob' trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.'

Kristof says that what Occupy Wall Street represents is 'a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists' and an entrenched system of 'government-backed featherbed[ding]' that amounts to 'socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us.' As Kristof notes, he's seen this before: Years of covering the '90s-era Asian financial crisis brought Kristof face-to-face with the same critique. It's now unspooling in the United States and having its own deleterious effects, such as the near-intractable income inequality that was, at long last, reported on fully this week (perhaps thanks to the presence of the Occupiers themselves).

Kristof's right to suggest that the Occupiers aren't 'half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system.' This isn't the 'Project Mayhem' of Chuck Palahniuk novels -- we're talking about a movement that's spurring people to move their money from 'too big to fail' banks into credit unions. That's not exactly 'smash the system.' That's more like a group of people seeking out a means to maximize their power within the system, or using consumer choice to preserve, enhance and improve the best parts of the system. As Matt Taibbi notes in a fitting companion piece to Kristof's, 'These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street.'..."

(internal links, excepting the Kristof original, removed; italics mine)

Note to self: this is why formlessness is a virtue. Here, this right here explains the demand for shadows and black hands. This Kristof clownshit is what you get out of democratism, consensus building and reformism. You get to the gate, and the keeper is all like, "Hey fuckfaces, you can't look like radicals. So, let's get you some public relations and a press agent. And like, no way dudes, that's what I went to college for..."

You get a "defense" of your sweat and blood and the gift of your permanently irredeemable time that makes a mockery of your suffering and insecurity at the same time as it re-frames your rebellion, your unrest, your protest as a confirmation of the goodness and rightness of the status quo. Sure, sure, there are some problems with bad actors and wormy apples. But, the mediators and gatekeepers are eager to tell you, "...what you're really pissed about is the fact that the big bad baddies are acting like, um, bad guys. Now, if only there was a way to make power safe for everyone, then we could get back to the business of doing business, which is like never about sucking people's life and labor and turning it into toys that rich pricks forgot they even bought..."

Fuck. You get "dissent" that is safe for business.

Tomorrow, some rich bastard will shit out more expensive feces, as valued by the price of the food that went into his mouth hole, than something like four fifths of all people on the planet will spend on feed for their families for a month.

Tonight, some wealthy fuck will get into a car the monthly payment for which will equal your total food, rent and transportation needs for the next two months.

Right now, one of the bankers who do "good capitalism" on a regular basis, in contravention of the claims of do-gooder reformists like Linkins and Kristof, will be earning in a single commission, after taxes, what it will take you and your lover two years to make, before taxes, expenses and fees are deducted.

We don't fucking need reform.

What's needed are the Brigate Rosse, dillingers, robin hoods, diggers, levelers, Rebeccas, Munster rebels and red emmas with their whips.

What we need are bankers who've forgotten how to sleep.

Against the light; or, physician give thyself an iatrogenic disease and die already...

2011-10-27T09:43:00.006-04:00

The reformist operates from a peculiar vantage; he has the light to his back, haloing him with his own contempt. He is learned, enlightened. He hangs out his shingle, he gives it illumination.He tacks his degree to the wall, and he wants you to see it. He's got a license to have this mission. He's got a geas. A need. To bring the light. To deliver the world into it.

The reformist is a good servant: he fancies himself a physician, a bringer of cures, an apothecary of bright tomorrows. He's a shopkeep for sickness' sake, and it's illness what keeps him in silks. He has a bag of purgatives, a schedule of drugs, a timetable for treatment by which to beat back the disease. Like a physician, he keeps a little hatred for his patient in reserve. And he's got a patient in mind, right from the start: sick and corrupted society, a sorry little whore suffering from self-inflicted social infections; she's mostly unlettered, bold in her stupidity, resistant to his cures, and a beastly thing better suited to the yoke than to honesty company. It's a rough trade, healing this whore, but the doctor is not above a little leeching.

But that's alright. He came for the fight.

The reformer needs the world sickened, and in darkness, else he cannot save it.

He's going to do battle with corruption, and he's got the light at his back.

In that he's like any other son of the light. He wants to shine it on you, on us. And that ain't even the scary part, his need to illuminate every darkness, to cast out shadow and doubt, to have the whole score of life written up in a well lit ledger, showcased in a hall of mirrors and bright lanterns. To take the credit for his cure, and to be celebrated for it in the light of day.

No, that's not the worst.

What ought to give us pause is the light, itself.

Maybe you have a moment to ponder it: the reformer, the would be king, the general, the academic with a system, the social diagnostician, the guardian of women's honor, the prince of art or industry, the salvificating preacher and enemy of sin, the witch hunters and vice squaddies, the therapist who will cure you of your own self - how is that they style themselves, er, as a rule?

Let the shadowed silence hold you for a minute.

Dispel the light.

All those once and future redeemers arrive first as heralds of a new day, a new dawn, an enlightenment, the bright future, the well lit path towards a better tomorrow. They offer cleanliness, and a lighted walkway to improvement.

Because.

It's a good bet that a man at the head of an invasion, or about to steal other people's children and remake them, save them, or offering a cure to society's ills, or with a plan to root out the sicknesses of crime and criminality, or with a mission to elevate women towards the perfect, to cure faggots of their gay, to rescue the mudders from their low and crowded living - he comes in the name of the light.

Because.

Every godsbedamned time someone kicks off a war, or a crusade, he calls on the name of the same god, over and over and fucking over again.

His god is a god of light. His cure is enlightenment, knowledge, purity and purification, the facts in the light of day, a cold coruscation, a revelation, a banishing of darkness, ignorance, shadows, doubt and the improper conduct which beggars the fools who live a bit to the left of the rays of the sun, who linger in shadows, or hold their hearts back from the unforgiving gaze of an eye that never closes.

He would deliver...

...salvation, redemption, enlightenment:

The fire glow from an auto-da-fé.

An interrogation lamp, anywhere.

An army psychologist's field notes, spotlighting breakdowns, radiant with insight into the deconstruction of women and men.

A mayor, by press conference camera light, brandishing enemies: low women and black gangs with mind darkening drugs. The police chief to the left of him, the prosecutor to his right.

The preacher man, highlights in his hair, fulminating against the music of the devil.

And the reformer, jaw taut with righteousness, half hovering over his seat, his mouth white with the tension and urgency of his salvific cause, suffused with the fluorescence, with the afterglow of his purpose.

The reformer would cure you. He would enlighten you. He would save you from yourself, from your habits, afflictions and addictions. From your base behaviors. He would elevate you, lifting you up closer to the cleansing sun.

Clean and light, that's the reformer's endgame. A world scrubbed and illuminated, a succession of bright days, alternating between classwork, intestinal cleanses, consensus exercises and moral edification. Wholesomeness, in a word.

A clinic.

And a clinical outcome.

So it's best, I guess, to keep this in shadowed mind when you meet one on the wayside. Maybe you don't have to take one of his needles out of that bag of cures and tricks and stick him with it. But maybe you do. You never can tell, really.

Massachusetts Delenda Est

2011-10-25T14:51:00.002-04:00

“...'I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do. … I support what they do,' Ms. Warren said of Occupy Wall Street..."

That's some mighty exaggerated ego, Madame Candidate.

Then again, the same candidate, on Iran:

“...'Our number one responsibility is to protect Americans from terrorism, that’s our job, so being tough on terrorism is enormously important,' said Warren yesterday at a campaign stop in Gloucester...We should take nothing off the table, but the facts are still emerging,' the Senate candidate said when asked if she would support military action against Iran..."

And on OWS, earlier this fall:

When asked about the OWS protesters, Warren answered (question begins at approx. 50:00):

"Everyone has to follow the law. That has to be the starting place. But no one understands better what the frustration is right now. The people on Wall Street broke this country and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago and there still has been no basic accountability and no real effort to fix it. That’s why I want to run for the United States Senate. That’s what I want to do to change the system.”

*

So...plus ça change plus c'est la même chose, and shit, eh?

(h/t commenter Frederick, chez IOZ- and Ian Welsh, for the earlier Warren quote on OWS)

Empowers

2011-10-24T15:20:00.000-04:00

"Empowers" is a term which traps its users. It gets you thinking that power is a possession, an item which can be packed away and employed later as needed.

Power cannot be owned.

It is not a trait which can be made use of, or a reserve of strength which can be tapped at a crucial moment.

Power is a relation.

It requires, at a minimum, one who submits or surrenders, and one who controls.

Yes, we have power lines and electrical power, and you can as easily speak of motive power as you can political power, but these usages of the word as not as divisible as might be cavalierly assumed. They are contextual, as with all language.

There is nothing particularly free, horizontal and liberating about the control an electric company has over its monopolized and captive consumers. And the car which you might drive from debt-house or rent-rooms to your box-of-labor-suffering is a tether attached from your needs to your death, and to all of the commodities you produce and consume on your way from one dark to the other.

And so on.

Like that.

Until you die.

Women

2011-10-23T09:57:00.001-04:00

I don't know why or how you put up with men.

I really don't.

It's like putting up with a skin rash, or a persistent cough, maybe? You may not want it, but it's part of being alive?

I don't know. Running a one in six chance of being raped is no doubt worse than living with a risk of pneumonia.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to do it.

If men were groped, leered at, pawed upon, demeaned, had their generative organs legislated and regulated, paid less than women, excluded from conversations as a matter of custom, raped at rate of one out of every six of us, abused, beaten, expected to be fuck-ready at the drop of the drawers, used as a symbol of wickedness, employed as a cause of social decay, held up as an impossible standard of beauty, castigated as the cause of criminality, excluded from vital decisions, blamed for moral failures, incriminated for how female children turn out as adults, standardized as the set of traits which define weakness and vulnerability, chided as vehicles of sin, idealized as unobtainable prizes, and all as a matter of tradition, culture, law and religion...

...we probably would have torched the world with nuclear death in a pique of self pity by now. Hell, we've already brought the human race to the brink more than once, without being treated like women.

So...

...there's that.

Withdrawal

2011-10-21T16:07:00.000-04:00

The "complete withdrawal" from Iraq is a pretext to re-invade. White hats can't ride in and save the day if they're already sitting in the saloon.

Just ask the Lebanese, the Gazans, the Burmese, the Persians, the Algerians, the Irish and the Iraqis themselves.

But, the really great thing about Obama's "end to the Iraq War" is good liberals getting all party loyalist because Mittens thinks it's a bad idea...

Dancing With the Stars and Stripes

2011-10-21T15:23:00.001-04:00

You should read Justin's Dancing With the Stars and Stripes.

(But I'd put my un-money on Chavez. It's been weeks since an MSNBC retired brasser or Foxpundit used the words "Monroe Doctrine". Plus, there's a king's levy of nativists just waiting to get breathless about the connections between Iran, Venezuela and Mexico...)

Obama's Victory

2011-10-21T07:14:00.003-04:00

Libya, in chaos.

A new "breeding ground for terrorists," which should cover at least two decades of discretionary spending and security centralization.

*

Bush did not handle Iraq with incompetence, as liberals have argued, in defense of good war doctrine. Obama has not poorly managed the NATO destruction of Libya, a position around which famous national conservatives have begun to coalesce.

The endgame was always the creation-by-destruction of permanent police zones.

Done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya (and if the war gods' blessing holds, Syria and Iran) with a combination of bombs, bribes, wetwork and the blockades called sanctions.

*

Done at home with the great theft known as austerity.

But don't worry.

Soon enough, they'll grow comfortable with the idea of bombs-for-domestic-security. Whole neighborhoods, predominantly black and hispanic, are already under blockade. The local cops and the national police routinely run special ops style wetwork missions in poor neighborhoods. Our political machine is a bribery cartel.

So, why not reaper bombs in defense of the homeland, against its internal enemies?

The sky death robots are currently deployed against the invasion of the Golden Mexican Horde.

It won't take much - maybe just a single catalyzing event - to bring the victory all the way home...

Maxim

2011-10-20T10:57:00.001-04:00

If you kill him*, they** will come.

* - Saddam, Bin Ladin, Qaddafi, Al Awlaki, Al Zarqawi, Al Masri, and for coming attractions, see Nasrallah, al Assad and Ahmadinejad

** - extraction, asset management, defense, security, finance and investment companies

Decrepitude, Breakdowns, Landslides

2011-10-19T12:00:00.001-04:00

Reading Monsieur, this song came immediately to un-mind:

...and from the tendrils of sound tickled out from those notes, to these:

War Pig Not

2011-10-18T16:22:00.001-04:00

Qualifiers: I don't care who is President. I don't trust anyone who actually wants the job. The earnestness in this video reaches beyond melodrama, and grasps at florid and purple pathos. It's a campaign ad, so, you know...

When it comes to war and the projection of power, Ron Paul is the only fucking candidate who has even half a clue.

Don't vote for him. Don't vote at all. Voting is stupid. Voting puts the stamp of your life on the power of those who want to use your life up. Get all up in a tizzy about Ron Paul's goldbugging, his abortion opinions and his standard Republican lip service to capital. He's still better on this subject than Elizabeth Middle Class and her "progressive fighter" drumbeat for Iranwar.

a title would only conceal the intent

2011-10-17T23:38:00.003-04:00

Late in the night, or just as I'm awakening, I think nonsense words.

The thinking of words is already foreign to me. I don't do it very often. Perhaps it was the drugs. Might have been the beatings about my head and face. But, I cannot remember ever thinking many words in my head.

My wife and I spoke of it once, and we ended that conversation frustrated, and further from comprehensibility than before. I have to think about thinking words. I have to plan them. I don't hear my voice in my head, and I have extraordinary difficulty picturing images. I can draw, but I cannot picture. When people suggest* that I "visualize" I find myself at a loss. I can conceptualize, which is something akin to imagining a series of interlocking x-y-z axis graphs, with a-vocal meanings, syntactically and contextually dependent, running between chart points and charts, where the connections can become words once I age my hands or voice in the process of giving structure to them. But I do not have much native skill with translating these graphical interrelations into actual graphics, or sounds, in my head. My wife and I happened to be discussing this just yesterday. It is still foreign to her that I am empty-headed and capable of quick argument and planning. I still think it must be nightmarish and burdensome to travel through one's day with nothing but one's own voice rattling around up in there, fucking up the world with its monotonous and relentless commentary. I quite like the lack of noticeable translation software doing its business of meaning-making, between the reports filed by the parts of me which are senses and the parts of me which are reflection, collation and recollection of sensory input.

(Writing is especially difficult to explain, since I have a full map of what I mean, but almost no directly remembered word arrangements, before I put pen to page or digits to keyboard.)

So the nonsense words are odd. Perhaps troubling, as in a puzzle, but without the emotional coloring of trepidation and worry. Yet. Odd, because I can hear myself hearing them, in my own voice. I'm not subvocalizing them, I don't think. I've spent several days now quietly sitting, especially when I feel the creep of sleep, keeping my voice box under attention. These nonsense words still seem to form, on occasion, right on the edge of the slip between conscious awareness and the self-containment of sleep.

It happened again, today.

I had to elevate my legs, earlier this afternoon, and after an hour of tedious television, and the inability to get past a sentence in the book I'm re-reading, I started to drift off.

It was at this moment, on the cusp of sleep, that I heard myself think what I now remember as trappinec dogannly. (traa pinn eck daw gann lee).

I couldn't tell you what it means. It's nonsense. I don't think it has meaning. It has the feeling of a dream wisp, a babble of sounds that the mind ought to be trying to force into symbols and value shapes, but which end it does not accomplish, perhaps from failure or lack of care.

I believe I should worry about this, given the other shit happening to my body and nerves, but I don't. I'm resigned to it, and that's also a new thing. I expected, I think, a fear response and was surprised not to have experienced one.

I keep searching myself for the usual signs of fear. Also, for the fascination and obsession which tend to accompany a new plight.

Nothing. This is just me now, I guess.

I couldn't even adequately explain to you why I'm about to hit the "publish post" button and vomit this wholly uninteresting swill onto the screen. It's intriguing to me, I guess. And perhaps I'm about to toy with the madness I've long expected, which claimed my grandmother for almost twenty years, and which may have owned a great aunt. Or maybe it's part of the same seeming** degeneration which has claimed the right side of my mouth, the two right most toes on my right foot, a portion of my left foot, and the inside of my left pinky finger and sometimes for hours at a time, the index finger and thumb of my left hand as well as the right side of my face and every now and again my left eye, eyelid, eyebrow and cheek.

Madness could liberate. Or I could suffer it deeply. Maybe it will skip me. Or maybe I'm finally just starting to really die.

Not the short, quick death of my now distant youth, where I was certain I wanted to die right up until I actually did perish - and can I tell you, that many sleeping pills will parch not only your mouth, but your anus.

Heh.

I pissed myself. I saw nothing, no loved ones, no bright lights. I needed water. My mouth would not moisten. I signed myself into rehab, but I didn't want to improve anything. I wanted to get in touch with Krishna, Shiva, Jesus, Buddha, Allah, the spirit of the raven - anything, because that fucking darkness was long and wide and deep and it didn't know my name. I didn't want to hunger and thirst anymore. I wanted to drink and gorge and wallow in revelation, faith, spirit and that most evil of fictions, capitalized Love.

I did acid and angel dust, magic caps and mescalin instead. Detox is a good place to discover all the drugs you have not done yet.

I played with my brain, trying to find God and gods and godhood in chemicals and then when I stopped pretending that I was consolable, that I could actually live with any sort of salvation and redemption, I gave myself to a cynical excess. Followed by a minimalist skepticism.

Eventually, the hallucinations faded to silence, and quiet, and I learned to make do. To work. To crawl up and out. To give my word and keep it.*** And then, because contending with assholes will make you one, I began a long course in hatred. And contempt.

I was my own subject, is what I'm trying to say. That's the mercenary life. And the mercantile one. To cultivate a contempt for your own self and turn it to profit. To have, but not to enjoy.

All and all, a wasted life, but eminently worth living. I've really done my life. I've had three terrible, great loves. I'm lucky enough to still have that third and best of them, to have it by not ever possessing her. She is grace, without consolation. She is love, without redemption. She is.

I've made awful, crazy and unreasonable choices. I have been faithless and too loyal. I have refused to be what I was expected to be. But I've also murdered the man the me-boy once thought he could become. That fucker had to die, but I'm not sure this one ever really deserved to live.

So now maybe this is the real thing: the full dying death.

I don't know if I'm ready.

I also don't know if I even want the choice.

* - when I suggest that someone "picture" or "imagine," I have to do so with the awareness that I'm using those words within a poesis of sorts whereas the person with whom I'm speaking or communicating can probably just conjure up an image...

** - neurologically inconclusive; the MRIs and CATs and neuro-ophthalmology have shown nothing, except more payments to be made on the installment plan...I have migraines, visual artifacts, vertigo and intermittent dizziness and there is blood collecting in my legs, especially around my ankles, calves and heels, suggesting a circulatory problem about which my physician, two dermatologists, a neurologist and two separate eye doctors have consulted and shared information, but for which I have no other corroborating symptoms, and no diagnosis.

*** - fools give their word, idiots break it.

War Pig(s)

2011-10-14T15:20:00.004-04:00

"Two days ago President Obama authorized the deployment to Uganda of approximately 100 combat-equipped U.S. forces to help regional forces 'remove from the battlefield' – meaning capture or kill – Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and senior leaders of the LRA.

The forces will deploy beginning with a small group and grow over the next month to 100. They will ultimately go to Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the permission of those countries.

The president made this announcement in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Friday afternoon, saying that 'deploying these U.S. Armed Forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts in central Africa.'

He said that 'although the U.S. forces are combat-equipped, they will only be providing information, advice, and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense'...”

ABC News

Not that I'd wager money I don't have, but it would be nice to have some spare change for an over/under bet on how long it takes our good liberal pundits to mount a Responsibility to Protect defense of the latest move from our Nobel Laureate War President.

I'm going with six hours.

As for their conservative brethren, I figure it'll take them at least eight hours to figure out how to criticize the Preznit for his application of the Clinton-Bush-Obama Doctrine while still singing paeans to the Noble Troops and their struggle to improve the lives of all the women they themselves are currently not occupying and raping...

*

That fucking shit is depressing. I'm not a pacifist, by any stretch, but the brazenness of the Laureate's dedication to the expansion of permanent war leaves me wondering if those of us bound by the homeland's borders have any capacity to stop this shit anymore. I mean, I wouldn't exactly applaud the shooting of Senators and other imperial functionaries, but I don't think I could bring myself to condemn it, either.

In lieu of getting myself watch-listed for advocating domestic terrorism, here's some Azam Ali to sing us through to a better tomorrow, even if it's only imaginary:

(Lasse Pour Quoi)

(Ben Pode Santa Maria)

Fifty three multiplied by zero equals zero...

2011-10-14T01:40:00.007-04:00

When I suggested, mostly to myself, that the self-styled "53%" might be worth some attention, it was neither to promote their claim to be the authentic America, nor to disparage their perceptions of actual suffering. Since then, others have broached the subject, more or less in keeping with ticks and temperament.

It is this assumption of authenticity - and it is not confined only to bootstrap believers - which I personally find most interesting, predicated as it upon a cultural hegemony and a political superstructure which exists precisely for the so-called 53%.

Typing very broadly, they rightly perceive the end of their order, because demographics are in fact a kind of political fate.

Ruling factions need governed populations. They need people who serve as extraction points, who are roughly equivalent to raw materials in an unprocessed state. Historically, the form varies: slaves, the corvee, peasants, proletarians, the permanently indebted; their chief function is the production of labor. In our own age, that is labor sold, and excess labor consumed, or distracted. The factions of the ruling class contend with each other for control of these laboring populations, seeking them out wherever conditions provide for the cheapest purchase and the most flexible interface. The factions compete for control of divisions in memory: cultural, tribal, religious, ethnic and national boundaries which are drawn and redrawn in order to lay claim to labor. These laboring populations have a relationship to the states which claim possession of them, one which takes shape according to the needs of state and the strengths of competitors: they are bound by a rough and one-way rule of custom, tradition, religion, crude history and the threat of force - whatever it takes to produce a minimum fealty to those who own and rule.

The ruling class, and its factions, need to possess them. Which means, management.

States have an interest in producing client populations who buffer and manage the pool of labor and its extraction of resources. Who absorb discontent. Who are vested in their own separation from it. States encourage their existence with investment in the infrastructure and institutions which produce them, and to which these technicians and professionals will later on profess considerable devotion.

These technicians don't only serve as the ruling class support staff. They are equally its clients. They are the protected.

The point of running a protection racket is to have someone to protect. And to have enemies against which they must be protected. The ruling class needs clients who also double as consumers of excess, as buffers against disorder and decay, and as absorbers of discontent. Most actual and historical states preserve this client population more or less with predictability. The state and its ruling factions don't need the buffer, exactly, but it makes the business of being wealthy and powerful a whole lot easier. It is from this client pool that the ruling class and its various factions draw their technicians, their management, their support staff, their caregivers, professionals, systems operators - and their officers. Client populations derive some benefit from the relationship. They are not merely human resources. And these client groups vest themselves in response. They buy in. They belong. They are not possessed. They serve, and this requires a less immediate, less visceral and less visible set of bindings: a tradition and mythos of self-reliance, self-creation and voluntary existence. This might explain the long-standing project to develop, shield and promote the nuclear family. Nuclear families are protected by the state. This kind of family produces isolates and managerial personalities; and they are governed by an urge to succeed, to merit, to deserve, to keep faith with the expectations of those who rule. It demands the repeatable formation of a specific self, a narrow and truncated type conceived and formed to treat with itself first as an independent ego ensconced in purpose and convinced of its own self-causation, and secondly as a truth unto itself.It is a type which places a high value on faith and loyalty: in marriage, in law, in custom, in deed, in debt. Its gods are debt-managers. Its heroes pay their dues, pay off the loan, pay the ultimate sacrifice. Its villains are oathbreakers, layabouts, cheaters, scoundrels, vagrants and the corrupt.

The recurring theme of corruption crosses political, moral and religious divisions - for the technicians and professionals. It animates their righteousness. It is perhaps the defining characteristic of this type - a deep rooted, material, mnemonic fascination with and recoiling from corruption. It is their awe; it is what they desire and shun, in identical alternating moments. Their politics and their morality reflect this fact. Corruption is, for them, the antithesis of the good faith to which they been bred. It is sickness, a contagion. It is failure. It is, in short, the failure to deserve.

It is no surprise that they see in the Other a source of corruption. For liberals, for the good fight progressives, that corruption wears the face of wanton power. It is power which negates the liberal noblesse oblige. Raw power. Power which does not improve. The Other is a man on a mythical horse who should have known better, a potential knight, but one who corrupted himself instead in the base pleasures of brigandage and rapine. For conservatives, that Other bears the sins of Eve, and the traditional mark of Cain - she is an outcast before she is ever born. The Other's depravity is its natural condition. God, nature, fate, history, breding, evolution* are vehicles for the confirmation of this depravity. The poor are moral failures. Suffering is self-created, it is a falling away from the hegemony of the norm, a norm which peers out from under its limitations and withdraws back inward if it does not see itself looking back in upon it.

This is the historical moment in which we find ourselves: that norm no longer functions. The built in limitations, the constraints, the self-disciplining customs are all less useful. The faces have changed. Lifestyles have taken hold of a media saturated culture, and permissible conduct has expanded in response. The ruling class has adapted to demographic fate. It has co-opted some of its former excluded identities. It has become, in a word, tolerant - to the degree that these tolerances preserve its power, and aid in the contest between its factions.

For liberals, this is no real problem. Their Other is the other half of the managerial sub-class. They are in conflict at their own level. It is a horizontal dispute. It is a political fight, between class equals. They are fighting corruption in their own ranks.

For conservatives and nativists, this ruling class tolerance is far more troublesome. It is a corruption from above and below. Their relation to new lifestyles, populations and pressures is reaction. They imagine themselves as conservators; against corruption, they see themselves as both the protectors of order and as clients of its protection, struggling with an Other that not only threatens to end the cultural hegemony to which they belong, but which is in a devil's compact with corrupt leaders who are shockingly willing to reward laziness, sloth, racial inadequacy, sexual deviancy, gender disloyalty, role and rule breaking, and a host of other sins, all in trade for unjust and unearned power.

It is a threat to their authenticity, to their rightful, faithful, loyal claim to the nation and its culture. But it does not bring them, as a rule, to a breaking point, to severance. They retreat backwards. They take refuge in their myths. They double down on loyalty to the very people who not only rule them but who will gladly slot them down into poverty for a cheaper client and a campaign ad with brown faces in it.

I kid you not. This is no jest:

"...I totally DON'T hate wealthy Americans. No wealthy American stood up and embarrassed me at an event I thought was supposed to be fun for all. No wealthy American insulted my then toddler daughter and refused to give me any strategies to try with her instead. No wealthy American imposed language barriers on me except when they had such unconstructive criticism. Even those I would think would identify with the wealthy, like unionized public sector employees, and those with science educations who could easily qualify for any number of technical jobs, hate them. One has a two income one grown child household and has the most hateful things to say about them.I don't get it. Some of the nicest people I've met have been wealthy medical, dental, legal professionals. The medical director at our lab in another state was the most down to earth person who treated everyone the same, entry level, admint, technical, white, black, Indian whatever.These people donate as a rule much more to private charity than the less wealthy. They tend to have jobs to give people in need.I babysat for wealthy divorced parents in my college years. These folks had older kids and typically just needed someone to give their kids rides home, either see 'em safely in the front door, or even sit with 'em for a few hours in one instance until dad got home. A girlfriend, having a student only visa and thinking she'd be waiting until retirement for her Green Card, noted "These people aren't looking for a green card. They're looking for someone with patience to sit with their six and three year old for 3 hours in the afternoon." She...and this is someone from a well to do family, but she wanted money of her own...had a part time babysitting job from these supposedly evil people.Why the hatred of the wealthy? Do some really want to see charitable contributions to private charity dry up, or employment opportunities go down further in the event of increased personal or corporate taxes? I simply don't understand this mindset."

You know the reason....Some people have a lot, some don't.The idiot left sees this imbalance as 'unfair' and therefore must re-distribute some of that wealth to those poor unfortunate souls who aren't 'winners of life's lottery.'"

"because the politicians know that the people they appeal to cannot work out that without the so called rich none of them would be employed if they are, none of them would get entitlements if that is how they live with no rich to tax to acquire the moneys to fund those entitlements, nor would they have any modern luxury or convenience because it is the rich that produce them. without the rich these people would be eating grass to survive just like the north koreans. but the political hacks that play this class warfare thing is safe because enough of the masses are not only ignorant of these facts but are incapable of comprehending it even if given a picture book laying these facts out in simple form. it is amplified intentionally by politicians who view it as their ticket to perpetual office and power. they have not the ethics to ever correct the ignorant nor resolve not to take advantage of it.however this is a dangerous game as many other regimes have learned to their sorrow. when the revolution does inevitably come it is always beyond the control of the political class that fomented it and it always executes them in the end."

"Wealthy people get in the way of total government control of the people. It will be a truly classless society with no one having more than the least ambitious among us. That's what the liberals are telling me and what I hear here and from those practicing their religion down in Wall Street parks."

"The wealthy, many of whom have built their riches through hard work and blood and sweat of their brow show that it can be done. They are jealous and also angry that someone lights up their drab lives of non-achievement and shows how their lack of effort is the only thing keeping them from achieving the same thing. They are afraid to take a chance and risk other than the weekly $250 purchase of lottery tickets to get rich."

"Animosity and Jealousy. I'm not rich, far from it. But I don't dislike the rich, in fact, I respect them, and use them as examples of where I want to be. Instead of sitting around all day feeling sorry for myself and wishing I could get lucky, I went after what I wanted. I did the things it takes to have a comfortable life. Could I have been rich? I doubt it, not really that smart and I have a bit of an attitude problem, especially with dumb asses. But I'm smart enough to know that I need to be responsible for myself and my family, and not rely on someone else, because every time I did I got screwed. Even simple things like relying on someone to pick you up if your car is broke down. Forget it. Easier to just rent a car or walk."

"just look at Greece. Young people throwing a hissy fit because they might have to wait to 55 to retire (on the g'mint dole) instead of 50. Really? Sadly it reminds me of the OWS people. You know what is sad and encouraging at the same time? We have a country that for the past 200+ years encouraged FREEDOM with RESPONSIBILITY. We've had people from all around the world literally DIE to get here. These folks, whether from Ireland, Asia, South America, Central America, Poland, etc etc, came here to be free.....to either be 'safe' or have a chance at becoming 'rich'...........Many of these same people are shouting from the rooftops as to where we are heading. They escaped tyranny and now find themselves in a similar position.....but we don't hear from them (at least on the MSM).......I cautiously await legal immigrants (especially the hispanics) to wake up to the the fallacy of what the D party is selling. Just like I'm cautiously awaiting the blacks to wake up to the same fallacy. From my personal experience, blacks and hispanics have roots in Christianity.....yet their 'party of choice' has made a pointed effort to kill their religion, all the while sucking them into thinking only the federal g'mint can take care of them...............if/when they wake up, we will see a true revival of this country.Rights aren't granted by government.........we are born with them...... (until the fed g'mint grew and infested the schools, we all knew that). Sadly, the progressives have mal-educated people from all over the world that their 'rights' come from a big-bloated-government"

"I am puzzled by this sudden phenomenon that makes it fashionable to hate rich people. I thought in America everyone aspired to be rich. I think if given the choice of who to hate, it is much easier to hate poor people. They are society's losers, and I was always taught that America loves a winner and hates losers. My take on the Wall Street occupiers is that they are mostly either college drop outs or college graduates with degrees in meaningless subjects that have given them no job skills. For example, International Relations. Now there is a real know nothing subject. "

"greed is wanting what you have not labored for... the desire to take that which one has NOT EARNED.. greed can also be the desire to not give from what you labored for..... it is not the governments job to determine what the level is or what i must be forced to give.."

"Pure, unadultered envy "

That, strangers and friends, is the 53%. That's the Tea Party, right there. Them's the fiscal and social conservatives. The values voters. The glibertarians.

Sure, they aren't merit liberals and institutionalists who will bomb Yemenis into dust in the name of a forward progress and the responsibility to protect.

They'll bomb them in the name of Jesus and his Parable of the Holy Job Creator, instead.

(quotations compressed by Google, damn it)

* - the mechanism has become irrelevant; the message is its medium...

Authenticity

2011-10-13T09:17:00.002-04:00

Don't trust the "authentic." They complain with the voices of a bloated and drowned existence. They are swollen corpses, re-animated with resentment.

If a man would have you believe "authenticity," he's asking you to place your faith in a circle of acceptable conduct, with him at its center. He will hate you for leaving it. He already hates you, which is why he wants you in it. It is his vanity, circumscribing a life he no longer has the stomach to live. He is already complicit. He has complied, surrendered. And it's not enough to do it alone. He wants you drowning in simplicity with him. He wants you to be himself.

It is a mean, petty, beggared existence, this adherence to a demand for "authenticity." It's one thing to be honest, to speak words which match memory and experience. It's quite another to assume that you can know how to best live for everyone. And to rage at others when they choose not to drown, or even just wallow, at the shallow edge of a muddy puddle To fury at them when they fail to choose to conform to a simplicity which is as artificial as a Versailles ball room. If you aren't constrained by the limits of an undead shuffling towards a real-dead grave, the "authentic" will crave your embarrassment. It's the closest they can get to believing you too are a corpse. That you are one of them.

Given a thousand thousand opportunities to conform, and even in the face of terrible and real oppression, at the boot heel of manacled slavery, at the juncture of starvation and compliance, people still diversify. For all that we share an organic baseline, we lead dissimilar lives. Within a single household, under the same parental gaze, with the same standards and rules, two children will become different. And one is not more "authentic" than the other.

Hatred for this diversity, for the panoply of possible humanities - and it is hatred, whether its speaks fancy words, cloaks itself in revolutionary rhetoric, or grumbles from the seat of a rich man's bicycle, stopped sideways on a trail through stolen Indian land - is an emotional shorthand for a life conceded. In its least refined form, it translates a desire for simplification into a hunger to consume the lives of others; it confuses sincerity with a chimaera "authenticity." It is a personal defeat ballooning, swelling out in a blast radius of wounded pride and a failure to die at the right time. It is death, with a human face.

Because.

There is no correct way to be human. Right and wrong have nothing to do with how to live - and this covers all human conduct. All of it.* Those who want boys "to be boys," who need women "unadorned," who rage inside at the moving image of children who play but have never learned to pray, who need feats of strength to test their masculinity lest anyone question it, who would have their own meager mental entrails become the standard and the norm: these are the tyrants, big and small.

It may mask itself as rebellion, this demiurge towards "authenticity," but it hears a single voice, an endless self-confirmation: "I am right. I am right. I am right." It is the old god-voice in the head, and from that pulpit issues the same old demands: Be like me. Be like me. Be like me. Because the "me" doesn't know how to be other.

It is the remnant of desire - of need thwarted in the decay of a shambling corpse of a life. Perhaps, even, it as an authentic one; a body servant to a life which has already perished, ridden by a brain that doesn't know it yet.

Anyway you want it - and you have the freedom and liberty to want everything - the "authentic" cannot be trusted. They would kill you too, and have you share in their pallid reflection, a companion corpse staring into a cracked and greasy mirror.

* - which does not justify the rapist or the murderer; feelings of right and wrong don't alter the fact of the act itself. They are epiphenomena. There is an argument for stopping the rapist. Or even killing him. But, right and wrong don't speak to the desire not to be raped. Or murdered. Or punched in the face. Those needs are good, of themselves. They don't have to wear the heavy drapes of morality.

Good Capitalism

2011-10-09T05:32:00.000-04:00

See the poor people everywhere? See the hunger, despair, war? See the self-violation which proceeds from mandatory markets? See the loss of horizon? Smell the poisoned air? Hear the mother's heart break as she travels from her first job to her second? Taste the sewage processed into foodstuffs?

That's "good capitalism."

There is no "bad capitalism."

Capitalism is death, arranged in working shifts, arrived at with a weary sigh and a savaged memory, felt in every moment, overriding the will to enjoy, broken down into consumable bites, inevitable as plague which follows the transformation of bodies into carrion and lives into fetish. It is the reward of kitsch, in exchange for a calibrated dying.

It is the body, broken to a transcontinental rack.

The mind rendered mindless.

The reproduction of life as the gateway to grave.

Steal this Image And Give It Away

2011-10-08T16:56:00.001-04:00

(h/t Coldtype)

The 53%

2011-10-07T17:17:00.001-04:00

Movements and counter-movements, created within days and weeks of each other. Mediated, and manipulable.

Who controls the medium? Not the 99%. Not the newly named 53%.

The 1%.

And while the various media of nearly instant communication - and reaction - can be used to criticize and challenge those who own the media of exchange, they're also as likely to be used in defense of them.

Loyalties take shape. And then, they stick. In place. In the craw.

They get in the way - these mediated identities and loyalties. They are - obstructions.

The man who joined the Marines at 20, the college drop out business owner, the orphan who lost her mother and her security - they are the white majority; they are still under threat. On the edge. They feel the decline in their own fortunes perhaps as acutely as those who've taken to the streets in opposition to the 1%. But, their radicalization takes a different form, follows an alternate course.

They've come to defend. The blame falls downward, which for them is where it belongs. The shiftless, the Others, the lazy - they bear social and physical markers of their shame and fallibility: they were never the elect.

These are the small holders, these 53%, who have begun to shape a political identity around their payment of taxes into - and therefore assumed ownership of - the means of control. They are, as we discussed below, invested. Mandatory history has taught them a few noble truths: they are the nation, they are the elect. History looks back at them with their own faces. The whipping lash of the wage constraint, the choke collar of food scarcity, the alienation of racial and sexual othering hasn't struck them yet, or within the limits of their political conscience. But they feel the distance between themselves, this growing sense of wrongness and displacement, and those who rule; where we see classes, they see the cultivated divisions: traditions under threat, a God dethroned, a dollar in freefall and their cultural security fraying at the edges of a hegemony once believed everlasting. They mistake a lease for a deed and title, and that makes them as useful as the good liberals who would very much like to leave the project of power to proper and civilizing institutions.

These are the faces of reaction.

They can be fought. They can distract us, which serves the purposes of those who actually own damned near everything.

But wouldn't it be better to hear them? To listen, for as long as it is possible?

One day we may not have these fora.

And that day will follow immediately upon the realization, among those who rule, that the old wounds and divisions must serve their greater purpose again.

Until then, we would do worse than to be attentive.

Occupy

2011-10-07T10:28:00.000-04:00

Israel occupies Palestine. The Israeli state and army are occupiers. Israel is managing an occupation. It is an occupation, as in a career, to maintain that domination. The US occupies parts of Iraq, Afghanistan and every nation in which a US base has been constructed and used. The US military is used to enforce occupations. States occupy their territory, seizing and distributing the commons for the benefit of their ruling class. The ruling class occupies this captive commons and economy, first with violence, later with custom, law, entertainment and education. We have less of a class war, and more of a class occupation.

The folks in New York and their sister city movements are, in contrast, Occupants. They are attempting to re-inhabit a commons. They occupy space, to reclaim it. To re-create it. They are the first truly visible manifestation, in the last decade, of a resistance to the ruling class occupation of the lives and livelihoods of North America's inhabitants. This resistance will likely be co-opted. And that's okay. Those who have inhabited real space will remember. They have been altered.

That change will occupy their memories, and the ways in which they develop new means of resistance. It's a new program, and it will spread.

The second wave will emerge from that dispersion. And it will have the heritage of those memories, and the associated immunities.

It will occupy attention.

Tear and Frembling

2011-10-06T15:17:00.003-04:00

FDL's Kevin Gosztola on Ed Schulz and institutional liberals' attempts to hijack the Occupy movement:

"...The utter-contempt that existed toward this bottom-up movement has now been swept under the rug. The Occupy Wall Street movement has energy and momentum, which is exactly what President Barack Obama needs to get re-elected. It has people and media attention, which is why the organizers behind the 'Take Back the American Dream' conference made a calculation to adjust messaging and include talk about Occupy Wall Street. They did this because the conference was to be about producing a movement that could counter the Tea Party and now, as Van Jones explained to attendees, a movement that could be a counter-balance to the Tea Party had sprouted. They acted as if the people in the streets were for their vision and agenda and talked about how those people showed it was time to build a 'Rebuild the American Dream' movement to rival the Tea Party from the left. They even went to the steps of Capitol Hill for a two hour rally to 'send a message' to Congress.

Now, leaders who are working on the Obama 2012 re-election campaign or progressive groups that will be canvassing door-to-door to convince people to not abandon Obama are looking to tap in to Occupy Wall Street’s energy. The country is about to see, as Salon’s Joan Walsh suggests, what happens when a movement without leaders meets leaders without a movement. The segment MSNBC host Ed Schultz did on October 5 indicates liberals, whom the Democratic Party counts on to deliver votes, will be working to contain this movement and make it seem these are really frustrated Obama supporters.

"...Schultz opened the segment saying, 'The Occupy Wall Street movement is about to reach critical mass and the Republicans can’t do anything to stop it,' an immediate sign that Schultz is focused on how the movement can help Democrats. 'There is no doubt that the Republican Party is afraid of the 99 percent message and now they are attacking it,' he added.

After framing Occupy Wall Street as a group of the left that is against the right, even though the organizers’ message is clearly about those at the bottom against those at the top, he continued, 'This is the official start of the 2012 campaign. If this movement is heard by some candidate, this just may be the movement that starts a major change in this country.' You mean if someone like Barack Obama comes along and wants a second chance to show that he isn’t bought off by corporate and special interests, especially big banks on Wall Street? Because, while there is a growing primary challenger movement against Obama, there is a scant amount of support for that among progressives. And, if he is talking about congressional candidates, they face the same system Obama has been unwilling to challenge and no matter how good they are will be managed by the White House so they cannot get in the way of business as usual.

(italics mine)

Rush Limbaugh*, addressing his millions of dittoheads:

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the White House is behind this. Obama is setting up riots. He is fanning the flames.”

"The anarchists and union thugs who are rallying against corporate greed are Obama’s constituents."

“Occupy Wall Street is his base. Those are his foot soldiers.”

*

Dennis Kucinich wants you to associate his mug with OWS. Juan Cole wants you to associate OWS with Steve Jobs and Americanist techno-aesthetics. Ed Schulz wants you to imagine OWS leading to the election of an unspecified candidate, who will of course lead a national movement to do vague major change. Michael Moore wants you to remember that Michael Moore showed up in NYC to do some hang time with the hippies. He doesn't want you to remember that he was early and often a supporter of the Bombmaster of Sarajevo, one General Wesley Clark. Rush Limbaugh wants you to be convinced that the OWS people are the vanguard of a riot army. He probably also wants you to remember that he predicted that Obama would use NBP shock troopers to round up white people and steal the keys to the heart of Muddle America. Van Jones wants you to think that he's not a stalking horse for the Obama Administration, and Sean Hannity wants you to believe with absolute certainty that he is one.

So, what do we have here?

We have famous and powerful people trying to de-anonymize and take possession of a self-organized, decentralized, anti-political, celebrity-free and uniquely clever set of affiliated groups whose main tactic - and it's a shiny one - is to re-create a social commons as a means of producing new means.

Why is that?

A little fear and trembling, maybe?

Heh. Makes me happy.

Also reminds me that the populares never stopped being aristocrats. They didn't really favor the people of Rome. Especially not the proletarians and the capite censi. They just used them up, sent them to the latifundia and the mines, or shipped them off to war.

So, mebbe it's time to quote some Shatner**, in lieu of the more traditional Bakunin or Marx:

"...Sing along with the common people
Sing along and it might just get you through
Laugh along with the common people
Laugh along even though they're laughing at you
And the stupid things that you do
Because you think that poor is cool

Like a dog lying in a corner
They will bite you and never warn you
Look out
They'll tear your insides out

`cos everybody hates a tourist
Especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh
Yeah and the chip stain and grease will come out in the bath

You will never understand
How it feels to live your life
With no meaning or control
And with nowhere left to go
You are amazed that they exist
And they burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why..."

* - transcript will be linked when it's made available

** - "Common People", Has Been, Shatner

Poses

2011-10-06T14:32:00.000-04:00

(via Peta Pixels via Men Ups! via Echidne)

Glomming On

2011-10-06T10:25:00.002-04:00

Shorter Wee Denny: Like, wicked awesome, dudes! Those young people are doing neato stuff. That's why I'm going to submit legislation which will accomplish nothing, but will let me re-brand myself as a hero of the left. My name has been associated with taking rides in Air Force One and folding up like Houdini after a gut punch, for far too long now.

Shorter Juan de Cia: My man Steve Jobs is just so American. He could have been a dangerous radical, because of Muslimy blood and Araby parents. But, America made him good. And a Buddhist! And a wizard with digits! He's the adopted son of the American dream. Steve Jobs got trippy and iPhones are like LSD, because they blow your mind man. So, neener neener neener Rick Perry.

Shorter insane conservatives: Those fucking hippies in New York are shiftless bums. They're protesting because they're too lazy to be real manly men. They are the vanguard of Obama's jobless revolution. They're waiting for their moment to damage property and kill good Christians. Look - Sean Hannity told me so! The Tea Party was not astro-turfed. The Tea Party is Real America! (I know, because I'm angry about scary people who have vaginas, or brown skin, or who cannot afford to ride bicycles along old Indian trails and be super pissed about soft womanish men. No, no - I'm not obsessed with homosexuals...I swear it. Just because I paint everyone who disagrees with me as soft, girly, sexually compromised by penetration or hungry for cock it doesn't mean I have these things on my mind night and day. You shut up, you dirty pussy intellectual...)*

* - I kid you not: More insane conservatarians. The Tea Party, a wholly owned subsidiary of the GOP, is "authentic" and reflects real America (they're on to something there, by the way), but the folks at Zuccotti Park are parallels of both the Bolsheviks and the perpetrators of Nein Eleven™. There is perhaps no greater comedy than conservatives with their hands on history books...

Barack Obama: Build Up This Wall

2011-10-04T14:25:00.009-04:00

Barack Obama doesn't speak for the worker.

He doesn't speak for labor, for the woman who is right now scarfing down meat and corn by-toxins entombed in preservatives which were just minutes ago wrapped in a film of processed fossilized krill; while she maps out how best to coordinate dinner for her kids sometime between her day job and her after-hours employment, Barack Obama has just finished a meal prepared for him by domestic house servants who are also at the same time employees of the largest military directorate in the history of the human race.

Barack Obama doesn't speak for workers. He is not a spokesperson of labor, despite TeaParty™ claims to the contrary. He also doesn't speak his words for labor. Workers are not his audience. They aren't his demographic.

When Barack Obama speaks, he has a target market.

They call themselves progressives; sometimes they'll let you call them liberals, but not around soldiers, or the boss, or the angry white dude who thinks women are out to get him because no women will be caught dead fucking him.

That is, they are conservatives, ones who can live next door to a married homosexual couple as long as the gay pair knows how to tend a lawn; rumor has it that they will even accept a well-spoken black person at the next parent-teacher function, provided she doesn't bob her head up and down like those urban people do.

And as conservatives, they are vested people. We could call them compromised, or bought and paid for, if we wanted. Conservative, liberal, vested. It's all the same thing.

Vested people own a stake in the project of growth and extraction. That's their claim on the time and energy of the ruling class. It's why our politics is geared towards keeping them in. Ownership is more than a membership in the club. It's an active border war. Investment in a merit certificate, a company position, a political party, a progressive church - these are acts of definition. Those who belong are as marked by whom they exclude as they are by their inclusion. And they do exclude; conduct which requires a strong defense. An inside defines its outside, and comes to depend upon the struggle to keep what's out from getting in. Sometimes that means a little extra tolerance, or concessions to an image of reform. Sometimes it means hunting down wetbacks and hajjis.

It can never end. A moment without the struggle to succeed, to excel, to obtain what others cannot have is a moment the inside becomes indistinguishable from what it's not, and what it is without.

So what are vested people really good at, if we understand them as persons engaged in an enterprise of exclusion which cannot end?

They're skilled in the arts of belonging - attempts at obtaining a deathlessness, one which has none of the charm of a reach exceeding its grasp, and all of the bitter anguish and self-satisfied vainglory of a tombstone carved in a script without translation. They want a special security. It's called success. And it keeps the wrong people out. Because the wrong people have already lost their contest with frailty, imperfection and mortality.

Liberals, being conservatives, being vested and invested people, are wall builders and wall keepers.

And Barack Obama really does speak for them:

"President Barack Obama said he considers himself the underdog in the 2012 presidential election. And he has no problem with that.

In a Monday interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Obama said he is 'absolutely' the underdog in his upcoming race, due in large part to the dismal economy playing out on his watch. His comment came in response to Stephanopoulos indicating that a new ABC poll coming out later Monday found that 55 percent of Americans think Obama will be a one-term president."

Note how Barack fucking Pendragon Obama has used his tête-à-tête with that toothy macaque, Stephanopolous. He's positioned himself as Man with his back up against a wall. A wall he promises to defend, a wall the very existence of which serves to preserve the world in which vested people live. He's proud and happy to be there. It might even be his mission. Because there are dangerous people on the other side of this wall, and they want to tear it down.*

Barack needs his liberals. Really, he does. Admittedly, he's the most powerful politician in the world. And sure, he can issue kill orders, send sky death robots to deliver parents to their children's funerals, get for paid for the task, and get away with it. Yes, he assisted in the largest act of naked theft in American history. But, really - he's a guy up against the wall. A wounded pet. A man under threat. Shall we say it (because, well, Harris-Perry already has)? He's in danger of an electoral lynching. He's the underdog, this chief executive of an empire spanning the surface of the earth, with three hundred million immediate subjects, and a billion more under arms:

" 'I don't mind,' Obama said of the poll's results. 'I'm used to being an underdog.'

Ultimately, however, he predicted that voters will pick their next president based on who presents a vision for the future that can help ordinary families recapture the American Dream. And that, he said, is something he knows just how to do."

That's the Barack fucking Obama liberals (who are conservatives) know and love. He's their man, and maybe even their man-friday. And he knows it. He knows not just what to do, but what and how to say it. He's lying, but to liberals he's a man armed with the truth:

" 'When I ran in 2008, the basic idea was that ordinary folks who are working hard, doing everything right, just weren't getting ahead,' Obama said, citing people's frustrations with the rising costs of health care and college education. 'The whole approach of everything I've tried to do over the last three years is to say, 'What are those big changes that we have to make so that our kids are getting the best education? [So that] we've got the best infrastructure in the world? [So that] we've got the tools that allow us to succeed again?'"

Education. Success. Infrastructure. The man is talking institutions; social structures defined by their walls, by who they serve, and by whom they exclude. The "best education" cannot be "best" if it's available to everyone. Success delimits. A merit baby with the best education might succeed, but his elevation is inseparable from the failure, disqualification and proscription of the losers. His "ordinary folks' is a limited entry demographic. It's for vested people.

And while the rest of us wrestle with the petty struggles of hoi polloi, the feeding of self and children, keeping the heat on and a roof over our heads, not dying of preventable tooth infections, the boredom and dullness of a persistent alienation, the endless resistance to the monetization of our lives and love - the vested people are securing their camp and the walls which keep us out.

Barack Obama speaks for them.

He speaks to them.

And they are listening.

* - who, for nine hours of the day, are letting themselves be re-affirmed in the conviction that the voice on the radio is broadcast to them from an equally vital defense of the same wall, one which, should it collapse, will result in a red tide of socialists, immigrants and disorder. Here's our long distance image: Barack Obama and Rachel Maddow, hands against the wall, encouraging good liberals to come to their aid. Pressed against its other face, and in earshot, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity stand with caricature chins a'lifted, exhorting their troops to lean harder into the fight. Sitting atop the wall, the lords of wall street, Detroit, the oil cartels and the defense industry sip their champagne, or decades old single malt.

Serendipity, Or retracing a path in order to leave it...

2011-10-03T00:42:00.007-04:00

In light of the decentralized process used by the OWS people, and in anticipation of visiting the folks organizing for the cloned* undertakings in Concord, NH and Boston, MA, I decided to re-read a small book published during and after the French troubles of several years ago, one quoted here in months and years past. From that small book, a passage seemed to reach other from the page and grab me by the eyeballs:

"From Secretaries of State to the backrooms of alternative cafes, concerns are always expressed in the same words, the same as they've always been. We have to get mobilized. This time it's not to rebuild the country like in the post-war era, not for the Ethiopians like in the '80s, not for employment like in the '90s. No, this time it's for the environment. It thanks you for your participation... Voluntary austerity write large on their banner, the work benevolently to get us ready for the 'coming ecological state of emergency.' The globular sticky mass of their guilt lands on our tired shoulders, pressuring us to cultivate our garden, sort out our trash, and eco-compost the leftovers of this macabre feast.

Managing the phasing out of nuclear power, excess CO2 in the atmosphere, melting glaciers, hurricanes, epidemics, global overpopulation, erosion of the soil, mass extinction of living species...this will be our burden. We have to consume a little less to be able to keep consuming. We have to produce organically to keep consuming. We have to control ourselves to go on controlling. This is the logic of a world straining to maintain itself while giving itself an air of historical rupture. This is how they would like to convince us to participate in the great industrial challenges of this century. And in our bewilderment we're ready to leap into the arms of the very same ones who presided over the devastation, in the hope that they will get us out of it.

Ecology isn't simply the logic of a total economy; it's the new morality of capital. The system's internal state of crisis and the rigorous screening that's underway demand a new criterion in the name of which this selection and screening will be carried out. From one era to the next, the idea of virtue has never been anything but an invention of vice. Without ecology, how could we justify the existence of two different diets, one 'healthy and organic' for the rich and their children, and the other notoriously toxic for the plebes, whose offspring are damned to obesity. The planetary hyper-bourgeoisie wouldn't be able to make its normal lifestyle seem respectable if its latest whims weren't so scrupulously 'respectful of the environment.' Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag every objection to the exorbitant progress of control.

Tracking, transparency, certification, eco-taxes, environmental excellence, and the policing of water, all give us an idea of the coming state of ecological emergency. Everything is permitted to a power structure that bases its authority in Nature, in health and in well-being."

The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee, semiotext(e), 2009

It is Emergency which defines our coming age. It is to Emergency - and the preface to our age of Emergency was written in the extended verse of the "War on Terror" - that every justification for continued maintenance of the forms of power will refer. It is Emergency which mobilizes the masses. It is in the name of a succession of Emergencies that the ruling class and its states will attempt to strangle the arising and invigorated struggles against them.

So it means something, I think, that the folks involved in the OWS experiment have begun by rejecting the acculturated norm of Emergency and its consequent hierarchies, urgency, command orientation and urge to assign marching orders and battle order.

I know for Trots and Leninists like Richard Seymour, and the various dialectically constrained parties of Europe and sheltered academia, the OWS reclaimers and the inherent argument of their method (which echoes the quote above) are at best problematic, because it recommends abandoning the hierarchical and partisan organizational mode which dominated resistance to capital, imperial nationalism and colonial powers over the last one hundred fifty years. It further anticipates a fight which exceeds the limits of the party structure, and its intellectualist vanguard, who are obedient to norms which are no longer really prevalent. Those engaged with today's conditions are proving forward enough to identify the functional unity of state and corporation, as well as recognizing that the apparatuses used to obtain, process, share and utilize information, security and the capture of privatized knowledge are nested within each others' overlapping spheres of influence and authority.

The self-organized are not fighting old battles against dead enemies. Unlike the official socialist, social democratic, liberal and sectarian factions which seek to channel and corral dissatisfaction with living conditions into a capture of state offices and meliorative state policy, the latest wave of rebels - from Tunisia to Egypt to England, France and now the US - have begun from a starting premise, perhaps unvoiced, which recognizes the material conditions of our common now.

We live in a political and economic environment which strains at the edge of a closed system that has failed to expand fast enough to contain its discontents. It was once properly understood as an expanding closed system, but it has probably already passed its terminal point, and begun a period of both contraction and reaction. The second law of thermodynamics will not yield or compensate for the feedback loops the system produces within its own overlaid areas of control.

It is a system governed by men who have no choice to but recolonize their own homelands, to treat their captive populations as both markets and surplus stomachs and desires. But these feedback loops of discontent, the repricing of labor's value, the rise of debt and household overhead, the disruption of climate norms, the cascading failures of the food distribution system which follows and the accumulation of governing costs** that outpace the benefits given to those who rule: these have their own set of consequences, the most immediate of which is fracturing of the ruling class consensus of the last seventy years. It was once possible to satisfy the cultivated public demand for security and prosperity while retaining the control of the economy which allows for a ruling class, through a disciplining of workers and managers which bound them to a national project which purported to involve them in the pursuit of the chimera of economic growth. That this national project was largely defined by who it excluded did not matter much over the major period of its application, because it invested the type simultaneously most dangerous and most necessary to the system in the preservation of it; namely the aspiring middle class white male and his familial group.

It was the trade and union laborer which threatened the ruling class through the period encompassing the last decade of the nineteenth century and first three of the twentieth. And that worker was almost universally of European descent, and male.

Certainly, women and minorities played significant parts in the early labor struggles, as evidenced in Lawrence, New York, St. Louis and the Pacific Northwest - but they had no effective voice in how labor approached its struggle with capital. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Red Emma Goldman, Mother Jones and Voltairine de Cleyre might be famous, not the least of which for their notoriety - but they were the exceptions which proved the rule; formidable women who rose to prominence precisely in contrast to the white male norm, gaining influence and lasting import by their ability to break with it.

The New Deal, coupled with the so-called shared prosperity of the boom years of post-war America and successful anti-Communist propaganda (paid for by tax receipts and Chamber of Commerce ad buys) solidified the disciplining of labor by subsuming it within the national project. It vested the white male who controlled and comprised the bulk of organized labor in the creation and maintenance of the expanding closed system of American military power and economic might. He became its primary defender, and the preservative agent most resistant to revolution, and its paler cousin, reform.

Perhaps for this reason, those excluded from the dominion of prosperity - women, minorities, migrant workers and cast-offs from the Christianized nationalism into which labor had allowed itself to be co-opted - sought new ways of reaching the social escape velocity which would allow them to flee the gravity sink of the American culture and power; a culture which obligated them to do obeisance to the various hierarchies dominated by white men, this including labor, in order to share from the leavings and scraps of the expanding system's growth.

It is also worth noting that every time an economically viable group of them managed that escape, it became the priority of labor's official organs, as well as its allegedly representative national party (the Democrats, after 1964) to recapture them and mobilize their efforts, organizations and modes of existence back towards the controlled markets, household norms, political offices and especially the doctrine of growth and personal success which maintained the ruling class system as both distracting spectacle and iron gloved hand of control. It might be useful to see official labor and the Democratic Party as an early social version of the Star Wars program, organized to perform a defense more against internal discontent than any supposed outside threat.

Of course, some who broke away - the early lesbian separatists, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen (despite, or perhaps because of their flaws), Marxist and black feminists, the AIM and their like - could not be re-absorbed precisely because they rejected the chief signifiers of labor's compromise with capital: whiteness, male power and hierarchical control. These were handled in the usual fashion - criminalization, ostracism and slander. They were Othered, often violently, because the community in force was already defining them as those who marked the limit of that community by their exclusion from it; their exclusion reinforced the inside-ness of the white and male dominated norm. They were attempting necessary escapes, but those attempts themselves reinforced power by providing it with a domestic enemy: as spectacles, as the internal outsiders who could not be trusted to sit beneath the table of growth and accept their allotted place and pittance. Theirs was a series of prison breaks. But, in attempting them, they reinforced the hand which held them and others to the disciplined norm. A double bind, and a terrible fate: to assert one's necessary freedom and to know that it strengthened the hold of the oppressor not only over those who were othered, but also over the disciplined white worker whose appropriated labor was the primary engine of ruling class power.

The normative laborer of the twentieth century was a creature of mobilization. He was disciplined to it. He was Taylorized in school. He was encultured to it at the kitchen table, the Boy Scout camp and at the altar. He was mobilized to war, in Europe, across the Pacific, and later in Korea and Vietnam. He was mobilized to beat the Japanese factory. And the German engineer. To save Africa. To stop the dominoes falling. To stop stagflation. He was mobilized to fight communism, to acquire debt, to own a share of the so-called American dream, to have the best math scores, to test higher than the Koreans, or the Finns. He was mobilized to do sport, and to watch it. He is even now mobilized to own a car and drive it everywhere. He is mobilized to save the economy, the nation and the American brand. He is a herded beast. One who was raised and indoctrinated to see himself, nonetheless, as entirely autonomous.

And he is dangerous when threatened, because he doesn't really know any other way to live. He is the least adaptive creature on the whole of a continent, because that continent was organized for his needs and his small satisfactions, so long as he traded the lion's share of his labor for his place at the table, and accepted the rule and the ranks of those who mobilized him.

It's with this in mind, through this lens, that perhaps we ought to understand the explicit refusal of the folks at OWS to mobilize themselves, to establish a hierarchy and a platform which replicates the forms of ruling class power and its sanctioned organs of captured labor. One which, also not incidentally, breaks with the top-heavy and institutionalized European model as well. It is not insignificant that in Greece, Italy, France and England, it's the self-organized and un-mobilized who have given rebirth to an active and militant Left, and who continue to survive not only the various States' increasingly brazen attempts to contain them, but the official and sanctioned "leftist" parties' efforts to capture and corral their efforts towards the capture of electoral offices.

Perhaps, abandoning the structures designed to capture and discipline, the new rebels - in Tahrir and Tunisia, in London, Paris, New York, Athens and all over the world - have done so from a burgeoning awareness of the "rigorous screening" and the surveillance state which emerged from it. The decentralization of their social space, as well as their embrace of anonymity seems to suggest that this is so. Even in their eventual failures and setbacks (see, Tunisia and Tahrir; Greece), it is possible that they do and will continue to remain cognizant of the advantages and freedoms won through a refusal to be mobilized and disciplined into manageable and compromised bits and fragments of human terrain.

And if that's the case, even an aging Cynic has cause for a little hope...

* - rhizomatic?

** - which include entertainment and spectacle

Mobilization

2011-09-30T12:45:00.001-04:00

From FireDogLake:

"The nearly two week occupation of a New York park near Wall Street known as Occupy Wall Street, initially undertaken by a few, has grown into a significant mobilization of people."

(emphasis mine)

Stupid word, mobilization.

Armies mobilize. Armies are mobilized. Industries mobilize workers. It's a hierarchy thing. Boss wants bodies moved. Bodies do what they're told. Mobilization takes orders.

People, especially free ones, gather.

US Assassinates Own Citizen

2011-09-30T09:23:00.001-04:00

And?

How is this different from any other day?

How many drug offenders died in prison yesterday?

How many ~~persons defined as claimed subjects and property of the state~~ citizens died of exposure, untreated illness, hunger or police violence, following upon the direct consequences of state policy, yesterday?

How many will die today?

Yes, muscular squirrels are pleased by the specific killing of a thing.

Yes, Barack fucking Pendragon Obama arrogated a newly un-enumerated power to command his spokesperson to hold a press conference to better brag about the premeditated killing of things.

But, in case we're unclear on American history, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. States have claimed the power to dispense with the lives of their subject-property for as long as there have been states. Some of them pretty up the process with rituals of surrender and sanctification. Some execute their power to kill on the installment plan, taking twenty or forty years to do what a hangman's noose would do in five minutes.

States kill. It's what they do.

Notice all the men in uniforms with state issued weapons?

They are not for show...

Cornucopia; Thank You

2011-09-29T13:36:00.002-04:00

More, not less.

***

To respond to the conditions created by the inequality of wealth, of distribution, and the application of power with a call to asceticism is to provide the wealthy with a weapon against the poor and those with declining fortunes. The wealthy need fewer weapons, not more. Taking what they have, with an eye to not getting caught up in their systems of justice: a good start.

Their wealthy is complexified. It takes forms which defy the needs of their victims, and their throwaway surplus populations. You can't eat a yacht. We can't shelter beneath an iPod. You cannot dress yourself in game code.

Complexity and diversity aren't problems which can be solved. They are conditions, and comparisons. A puzzle, or a society, or a distribution system, is not complex in and of itself. It is more or less complex, by comparison to other systems.

A system created by people - be it social, or mechanical or digital, however limited or expansive - is a tool. Some tools are techniques. Some tools are objects. A justice system is a tool, often encompassing both objects and learned skills. A set of social mores is a set of tools and techniques.

A complex system will likely have a larger number of tools and techniques, some interlocking, some in conflict. A simple system may have a number of tools and techniques, but fail to arrive at comparative complexity because those tools are used according to methods and cross purposes which contribute to frictions and the wasting of energy. The system does not complexify because its energy is captured in its own decay. (There's a lesson in that.) Some systems remain simple because simple works. Until it doesn't.

There are also techniques which generate friction and disruption in order to police behaviors and govern responses to behaviors in others. As a way of preserving the benefits which accrue to the operators of large, complex systems. Think: masculinity, homophobia, "rugged individualism," drug interdiction, racial and economic isolation. Think: faggot, bitch, cunt, whore, nigger, gook, spic, wetback, kike and retard. Think: the effort and time which goes into cultivating people who must defend masculinity, homophobia, "self-reliance," using their own colonized and compromised minds and bodies as tools against others.

Let's consider: many of these techniques are learned young, from people who learned them young; it doesn't have to be planned. People devote considerable time and effort into reduplicating themselves in their children, without a master plan. Still, these are tools and techniques. And they serve the masters of a complex system which not only tolerates the disruptive friction of social war and conflict, but encourages and rewards it. Men are elected to office on platforms of bigotry, while glamoring crowds with "rugged masculinity." Companies market to identities, and sub-demographics -

A man buys a gun because an Other moved in next door. Maybe he buys it because he cannot make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compestela, and likes the feel of a holy relic in his hands. Or, his fears take hold of a commodity. He buys a piece of death itself.

A teen aged girl exchanges a plastic permission slip for some slip-on fucky.

A child is caged because he acts out, and becomes a feast of profit for peddlers of drugs, and peddlers of therapy.

Withdrawing into the identities which serve the maintenance of the system is not unlike advocating asceticism and puritanism in the face of inequity. It has a preservative function. It keeps the oppression fresh, by validating the forms and norms repression and oppression create. Identity re-directs and captures the energy and effort which, when used against the system, might degrade its functioning.

Identity, like poverty, constrains. It is a straight jacket. A prison cell. A gangland turf which, undefended, becomes subject to the need for a stout defense. Personality is given over to safeguarding identity; it is weaponized - until the identity subsumes the personality, and the experience of the world from a unique vantage is lost to the conformity of the identity. It becomes unbearable to tolerate "appropriation"; the personality embraces the poverty, demanding replication in others who share the markers of the identity created by tensions, frictions and oppressions. It reduces itself.

This reduction has an effect, even when lacking purpose.

The system generates new perpetrators: those who enforce the oppressions, and those who enforce the identities which capture personae in the struggle against oppression. Persons become levers. They become tools.

To demand asceticism (which is usually also disguised as "simplicity") - of persona or conduct - is to command others (or self) to whittle personality down into a sharp object or a blunt instrument. It is an insistence on an evangelical submission to a persistent affliction: the single personality disorder. The experience of the world becomes instead the experience of a self which submits to the constraints* of an identity that rejects complexity and diversity in order to preserve that same experience of a single personality self from the frictions, contradictions, conflicts and horrors of a less than fully human existence.

The fully human existence is not an absolute. It is not universal. For the sake of brevity, but not simplicity, the fully human existence can be understood as "how the wealthy live." In a society without concentration of wealth or authority, it would probably be something else. Something truly "new upon the earth."

It might even be a cornucopia. But, to fashion that un-system of flourishing selves and unconstrained existence, it might do well to remember what asceticism and defended identity accomplish.

Let's just say the advocates of each do not understand "truth in advertising." There's no blame to them. Look who made them. And who made them. And so on.

All the same, isn't it worth a try?

Can you imagine the sort of people produced by this kind of society?

Can you fathom the person who takes shape under those conditions?

A wonder, I think. A wonder for the ages. And not one built of lies, suffering and slave carried stone...

***

Perhaps there is no more insidious phrase than "Thank you."

"Thank you" is an enforcement. It is a recognition of inequity, and a submission to it. Gratitude requires the grateful to participate in their inequity, and by doing so, to validate it.

A clue as to why it's so damned important to force children to say it all the time?

There's no good reason to be thankful for the demonstration of inequity. Unless you have a vested interest in rituals of submission.

What of gifts, and courtesy between lovers and friends, you ask?

What is freely given can be freely received, no?

What purpose does the ritual of submission serve between free and freely equal persons?

Well, is it really always about submission?

Of course not. And sometimes the word "cunt" isn't used to humiliate...

* - which are often also manufactured

Advice For Children, Unsolicited

2011-09-26T16:24:00.002-04:00

Do not trust knowingly decent people. It isn't their native temperament. They want more than simple kindness, or good faith. They want security, the promise of reward, or to pretend that they can have them, and that eventually means: the cops. A person who cultivates good manners wants something. He wants it from you, and doesn't have enough respect or regard for you to just come out and ask you for it.* He doesn't even have the honesty of the thief, or the mugger.

Actively suspect the man or woman who demands decency of others. Suspicion is a healthy reply - perhaps the only one - to the insistence on polite discourse and the manners of civilized company. It's an extraction: show good breeding, and we won't treat you like barbarians. The school mistress and the proctor are working for the boss. Always. Don't take my word on it. Look at the signature on their checks.

Hate - and with every possible flavor of that word - the preachers of good manners and polite discourse. They would have the world be what it is not, in favor of a world that never was. Also, they want to kill you. Or have you be an animated corpse. The world doesn't behave. Look out the window. The cloud doesn't obey a law of fluid dynamics. It is dynamic. The law at best describes what is no more. People are more and less complex than the interplay of water vapor and air currents. A person who insists on decency, who preaches politeness, wants the stone of suffering to hit the waters of memory and leave no ripple, no wake and not even the sound of its drop.

Laugh at the boldly indecent. Or with them. It doesn't matter. Really, it doesn't. The jester can toss a bauble, or slip poison into the drink. Especially when she's faking it...

* - Gracian would disagree. Or maybe it's that he agrees with me. Gracian instructs, like Machiavelli. You can read Machiavelli in order to raise a prince. Or bring him down.

(Thanks to Al Schumann for the window to the muse's fountain...)

Amem, or...er, ahem...

2011-09-23T09:14:00.002-04:00

I was going to attempt to Fisk this from Bill Clinton:

"Former President Bill Clinton weighed in on capital punishment on Thursday, saying courts need to slow down appeals processes to consider DNA evidence that could potentially prove a defendant is innocent.

Clinton's comments came less than 24 hours after the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, a man convicted of shooting an off-duty police officer. Davis' case sparked protests around the world from supporters who believed he was innocent, due to a lack of physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven witnesses recanting their original testimony.

'In any case where there's any chance that any DNA evidence could change the outcome of the trial -- I think that -- this is just me now -- I think that the appeals process has to be slowed down and organized so that any evidence of innocence can always be presented and then acted upon,' said Clinton..."

But, I realized this does it better:

Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996

Counter Messaging

2011-09-22T07:01:00.001-04:00

"Organised with Verso Books, eight leading thinkers will be discussing 'Communism, A New Beginning? at Cooper Union on the weekend of October 14th-16th.

Entry will be by ticket only. Tickets will be $20 and will be on sale via this site at the end of this week—please check back. There will be a limited number available."

(emphasis mine)

Source.

Heh.

Trial By Fire

2011-09-21T22:29:00.002-04:00

Trial By Fire

Blood Debts and Death Magic

2011-09-20T11:53:00.006-04:00

If all goes as planned for the government of the State of Georgia, on Wednesday, September 21, at approximately 7pm (tomorrow, from the writing of this post), Troy Davis will be poisoned until he is dead.

Should this occur, he will pay a blood debt to no one, upon the completion of an act of death magic which has no effect but the production of a corpse.

People who consider themselves human will applaud this exercise of power, no small number of them braying (and believing) that the poisoning to death of Troy Davis will by an explicit act of death and blood magic restore society to a greater good.

Troy Davis, like Cameron Willingham, will be poisoned until he is dead in the name of a life he very likely did not end. Even if he was the taker of that life, poisoning him to death will not now or ever restore it. Society will not now or ever be improved by the act, because the past can never be recovered.

No act of vengeance, punishment or judicial magic can change the past. At best, it can pretend to satiate the need to see another suffer.

Vengeance* is human, in so much as shitting and eating are human.

But, coupling vengeance with power or with the stupid belief in a propitiating sacrifice is not unlike shitting in one's own mouth and swallowing it. Because, and this is a rather simple concept to grasp, blood does not pay debts. Where one corpse or wounded body was, now there are two. Or more:

The death penalty is human sacrifice.

It’s the persistence of blood magic, the ancient and nearly perennial belief that the spilling of blood expiates crime.

To believe that poisoning a man to death will compensate for his deeds is magical thinking – that the past can be redeemed or altered, and that epiphenomena can be animated, by the doing of current deeds.

The death penalty is human sacrifice.

At the risk of reading as a broken record, it’s an attempt at blood expiation, at rewriting the unalterable past by way of present actions, at “righting the order of the world.” Perhaps the gods aren’t invoked as often, but the same “balance restoring” logic is still employed: if the Gods/State/Society aren't expiated with a blood offering, more bad people will [insert unexplained magical mechanism] arise.

People who believe that the social order depends upon this sacred or mystical balance, and also believe in the human sacrifice** that is the death penalty will go to great political lengths to preserve that order.

A believer in the death and blood magic of the "ulimate penalty" has to ignore the disconnect between the arguments about functionality, process or legal merit and the ineluctable fact that the executed person’s death does not and cannot alter the past. Human sacrifice might feel good (that’s the emotional point of vengeance and its lawyerly cousin, punishment – to feel good about hurting someone with the sanction of peers, to get away with violence against those who “deserve” it). It might allow the beneficiary of that violence, or the one committing it, to feel as if order is restored. But it doesn’t erase the actions which allegedly merit punishment. Because we cannot alter the past.

No debt is paid. No balance is restored. No past acts are eliminated or erased. It’s just another de-animated corpse where a person once was. Because, while the magical thinking is real, the magic itself is not.

* - which is no commentary on whether or not some people ought to die; I see little reason to suffer a rapist to live, though I have no faith that punishing him achieves anything but his death.

** - incarcerating a twenty year old for ten years, or the rest of her life, because she turned plants into narcotics is also human sacrifice; it's just on the installment plan.

One Word

2011-09-19T15:52:00.001-04:00

An internet friend brought attention to this piece:

One Word Turns the Tea Party Around

For reasons which I hope are fairly plain to my 2.3 regular readers, I don't personally buy into one half of the argument, because I don't see any reason to separate the modern state from the modern corporation. They are not seamless, but the are nestled together pretty and neat.

Still, it cuts through the glibertarian bull shit fairly well, and that's something.

The Cat's Wail

2011-09-16T22:40:00.000-04:00

Katzenjammer.

Four ridiculously talented women.

Enjoy:

("Ain't No Thang)

("Gybsy Flee")

("Shepherd and Princess")

("To The Sea")

("Mother Superior")

("Demon Kitty Rag")

("Hey Ho")

("A Bar In Amsterdam")

("Wading in Deeper")

("Virginia Clemm")

("Lady Marlene")

Just This

2011-09-16T00:40:00.007-04:00

Some people should die. Like rapists. Or slavers. Or torturers. Also, Harvard and Yale graduates. And people who want the chief executive job at a PR firm, or to head up an army. Or run a country. You know, the demonstrably reprehensible sorts.

Which doesn't mean they ought to be killed. It's just that, if the universe were just and fair and actually coded to promote human happiness (which it is not, natch), those people would die. Or at the very least, suffer from debilitating vertigo and glossolalia. They could have every possible desire to rape, kill, enslave, govern, rule, torture and generally be the sort of dick who gets off doing all that shit. But they'd be too permanently dizzy and creepily off-putting to ever be able to pull it off.

And as a back-up, they'd also have to suffer from chronic, stinky, highly audible meteorism. At the least. At the very least.

It might not be a perfect cosmos - because: asteroids, and planet frying quasar pulses, and viruses, and stuff - but claims to categorically imperative justice would have merit. They don't, obviously. Because the universe is unjust. Or, more to the point, because "justice" is at once a conceptual imposition on a universe which is neither just, or unjust, and it is the bloody hand of power.

As in, criminal justice.

Which happens when shitclowns who like to tell other people what to do, and generally make living between the two poles of darkness a miserable affair, devote a portion of their ill gotten gains towards the enduring project of caging, poisoning, abusing, raping and otherwise dehumanizing people who break their rules. Sometimes the rule breakers are also shitclowns, as in the cases of rapists, child molesters, wife killers, slavers and fuckwits who get wasted and then operate motor vehicles.

When shitclowns punish fuckwits for being too obviously fuckwitted to put on a suit, get elected to office or appointed to position and then do miserable things to other people for a profit within the sanction of the law, nobody actually wins but the shitclowns in suits.

It's incidental, if you catch my meaning. The coppers aren't locking up the rapers because the President, or the governor, or the mayor has a personal loathing for rape. Maybe he does personally loathe rape. It doesn't really matter. The cops aren't locking up rapists because rape is one of the worst things you can do to someone short of killing her or him, or as is often the case, because rape is a violation of a person so devastating that it can and does prove to be worse than murder. The cops are locking up rapists because their bosses have to repeatedly demonstrate that their protection racket is a net benefit to their client populations.

Client populations, you get?

That doesn't necessarily mean you. Or any of us. It might, if you have the right certificates. Or breeding. Or daddy. Or it might not, if you have the wrong concentration of melanin per square inch, place of origin, or religion. Universal justice and equality before the law are chimeras. And not the poetic variety, which transform a futile gesture into a memorable adventure.

Nope.

Universal justice is a fool's dream. A deliberately cultivated one.

Don't believe me?

It's all good. Let's take a break. You get your hands on a civics, American history, law, ethics or philosophy textbook. We can wait while you flip through their pages.

Drinkers, now's the time to quaff another draught. Smokers, you dirty smelly fuckers, light another one. Ronpaulians, I believe this is your cue to break out the hookah, the pipe or the bowl. Smackers, shoot one on the house. I don't judge. Whatever gets you through the night, right?

Here's a song, for the rest of us, while we wait:

There we go.*

That was a nice break, no? If you haven't had the delight of an introduction to the music of Lhasa before, it was my honest pleasure to acquaint you.

But, I'm also an asshole, n'est-ce pas?

So, the textbooks...

You see all those paragraphs wherein the text repeats, over and fucking over again, that law and justice are universal, or at least ought to be? See where the fancy ones discuss isonomy and the dumbed down ones go on and about "rights and responsibilities"? Go on, take a moment. Note how often these planned and designed study guides mention democracy, human rights, equality before the law, one man one vote, et cetera. It's like a catechism, or a sales pitch, or a call to be washed in the blood of the Lamb, or some shit.

If you care to spare another minute or two, flip back and forth to all those sections which make mention of struggle for equality, democracy, rights, and universal human behavior. Even the whitewashed versions which get the imprimatur and the nihil obstat of the mandate schoolmarmers end up contradicting the claim to universality, don't they? I mean, if history is the record of people with power resisting giving it up or losing it - and it is, this royal history we're still learning in the age of Democracy™ - then you almost have to wonder why these same rulers insist on mandatory schools in which the opposite is also taught.

If they have to teach it, and if it takes them ten or twelve years to get children to believe it - it really isn't so universal, is it?. That shit is indoctrination. And a sales pitch. Like a Budweiser commercial for childhood expectations, where after ten years of relentless campaigning, the target demographic finally begins to associate coded terminology with a set of unrealizable assumptions about what it is the bosses and owners do with all their horded loot. Budweiser invests in getting twenty something fuckwits with jobs to associate a swilly alcoholic "beverage" with boobs and vomit-free, project-managed Ken-doll camaraderie. The text books aim a wee bit higher. Or lower. It's all a matter of perspective. They want the little ones who will become consuming big ones to believe that every one gets a fair shake.

Because - and I hope I don't have to point out how obvious this it - almost no one gets a fair shake. Let's be frank: almost the only people living fully human lives are also exactly the same people who can afford to earmark a share of their stolen treasure towards persuading everyone else, and especially the children, that the evidence available to them everywhere and free of charge by way of some really nifty senses - well, that it is false. Hell, they know it. And they know you know it. When the teevee phase shifts from a formulaic girl-as-prize "comedy" to a 30 second spot introduced by Starving African Child Music, the ad agencies for the lords of all creation are playing it up.

The point of the indoctrination, and the sales pitch, isn't to elide all sensory input and feedback. That's not possible. Sargon's first ever anointed priest had already figured that shit out, thousands of years before universal public education, ad campaigns and manufactured consent. Mother Church has already conceded the point, to the chagrin of Cathars and Bogomils. The host is a piece of bread. Or a stale cracker. The blood tastes like wine...because it is wine.

The investment in indoctrination doesn't pay back its investors by erasing the evidence of the senses, or by overcoming the thorny and nearly indestructible human capacity to observe events with relative capacity and then communicate those observations to others in a shared tongue. Its return - and this stock splits with predictable regularity - comes from defacing them.

Which is how we end up back at justice, perhaps one of the more lasting and damaging defacements of sense, and sensibility. Justice obscures, because it insists on a universality which cannot be demonstrated, and which must be believed, right at the intersection between real pain and loss and the application of power.

Justice is a false proof...

...with real consequences, as Duane Buck and Troy Davis may soon discover. (And as Cameron Willingham found out.) That is, right before someone poisons them to death in the name of that false proof.

And you know how we can tell rather quickly?

Because without some dude in a black robe, neither man would be isolated in near-solitary confinement, awaiting a poisoning to death. And without the intervention of a dude or two in black robes, neither man will escape that poisoning to death.

But Barack Obama, who has admitted in public to ordering the murders of people he has never met, will close out the year with a salary in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and all the pretty people for his friends. Because dudes in black robes say it's okay for him to do so.

Maybe Messrs. Davis and Buck murdered other people. Perhaps they did not. The case against Mr. Davis is certainly far shakier than the one against Mr. Obama. Mr. Davis maintains his innocence and the cops and prosecutors who made the case against him are lying abusive bullies who intimidated witnesses, appear to have falsified evidence, and generally embody a perfected douchebaggery. Mr. Obama - also a perfectly embodied douchebag, and proudly so - signed a confession. In public. Without coercion. And to waves of applause.

One week from now, Troy Davis will likely be dead. Barack Obama will have raised another million or so dollars in his attempt to recapture the most powerful office on the planet.

Because there is no justice. Because the law does not apply to everyone equally. Because, in fact, the very ideas of justice and punishment are themselves colonizations of our memories, scripted and refined over the last five thousand years in order to get us to police ourselves in expectation of reward. Because the law doesn't exist, anywhere or when, without force or the threat of force.

Because, most significantly, while some people perhaps ought to suffer or die for their unending forays into pillage, depredation, rape and murder, the ones doing the bulk of the suffering and dying are their victims.

I don't know exactly how that can be changed so that everyone has it easy, and the number of people who want to boss up and make others suffers reaches an all time low.

But a good place to start, I imagine, is with a challenge to the indoctrinated belief in a universal and equalizing justice.

Actual existing justice is anything but...

...which is a bummer, in the short term. And for that reason, it's a damned good thing there was ever a Lhasa de Sela:

* - here's more evidence that "justice" is false: Lhasa de Sela died of breast cancer last year, but - Angela Merkel is the Chancellor of Germany...

Spartacus

2011-09-12T19:06:00.002-04:00

I don't normally write about television. Because it's television. I don't get criticizing shows for their lack of [insert your preferred demographic], or their failure to be properly [insert your preferred cause] because telly shows are produced to sell shit to people who cannot afford to buy that shit.

Some are well written. Some are not.

I started watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand, "just to laugh at [it] and stayed with because [I] couldn't stop watching" it. I thought it would be a poorly written, soft-porn train wreck.

It's not.

What it is is a surprisingly well produced, acted and even more than occasionally well written passion play. Perhaps most significantly, it is unrelenting in its portrayal of the upper classes of late Republican Rome - and by rather obvious imputation, the wealthy in general - as a venal, grasping nest of asps and climbing spiders. Spartacus is unforgiving in its depiction of the ruling and upper classes. Every choice made by a slave owner, magistrate, legate or equestrian merchant overlord results in surprisingly well sketched degradation of an immediate and identifiable gladiator, house slave or commoner. The connection between power and violence done to the lower classes and the slaves is drawn in stark imagery; and it is done to characters the show's producers have invested considerable talent in persuading the audience to embrace. No sexual act between the rulers and the ruled is ever treated as voluntary. No exchange or bargain offered by a Batiatus, Ilythia, Lucretia or Claudius to a slave is ever kept honestly, or honorably.

The message, written in blood and betrayal, is stark: the poor may be brutal, because they are brutalized, but the wealthy cannot ever be trusted.

That's refreshing, for English language television, especially here in the States, where we get a choice between Noble Cop, Noble Doctor, Noble White Teacher, the Noble Magic Negro or the Noble Spy Who Must Unfortunately Kill Brown People.

So, it's sort of sad (in a way I would not have expected) to learn that the star (Andy Whitfield) who gave the fictionalized Spartacus such compelling life has died from the cancer which forced him to leave the show.

Thirty-nine is too young for anyone.

In this one case, it's too young for a man who'd taken a "laughable" sexed up Starz original show and turned into in a story of pathos, revenge and even moments of high art.

Nein Coda

2011-09-12T08:55:00.000-04:00

"...Maybe waterboarding wasn't scheduled to go mainstream until 2015 in Corporate's 2000 long-term plan and 911 gave Corporate the opportunity to rush the install, but fuck any moaning about fucking lost innocence: it never existed, and what was marketed to you as your innocence was never yours to lose."

~ Mr. Red

Commemoration

2011-09-11T09:20:00.005-04:00

...on the day in question, I was a member of the New England Confederation. Three days later, we no longer existed as an active organization. No one thought our non-violence manifesto - the Lowell Declaration - would protect us against the assumed coming dragnet. Non-violence didn't protect New York cabbies, or anti-war grannies. It didn't take a genius to foresee how the federal State would use the toppled towers to get itself some more "sweeping powers." So we rolled up shop, in spite of growing interest in our aims (the secession of the six New England States), especially in New Hampshire, Vermont, Western Massachusetts, Adirondack New York and Maine. Since then, the rump of the NEC has been given a half undeath by glibertarians and free-staters, but the original NEC had a strong leftist contingent, to which tendency I was drawn, in spite of just wrapping up my last major Republican campaign.

It would be untrue to say that I miss the NEC. We really didn't have the cache, organization, popular support or loot necessary to make real our secessionist fantasies. But, we were always getting inquiries. Even from Massachusetts. We were a barometer placed in a neglected field, or some shit.

I don't recall any of the NEC members who wanted to be part of that barometer when it was stepped on and broken up into little bits. The fear was appropriate. Osama bin Laden wasn't turning airplanes into piloted missiles on account of us, but the federal police weren't known for caring, or for making the sort of distinctions which separate pacifist separatists from Salafi suicide kings.

Nein Eleven™ didn't change human behaviors. It didn't alter American discontent with the feds, or American naivete with regard to the suffering of the billions of people who aren't Americans. It didn't kill the bootstrapper mythos, or provoke a crisis in labor. It didn't create unity ponies, or expose new divides in the so-called body politic. It was just a grand scale murder used as a pretext for a war that both Republicans and Democrats were already in agreement upon, anyway.

The best way to commemorate that, in my humble estimation, is to recognize, in body and voice, that the time for fear and a rational cowardice has passed. The pretext was given. The advantages taken. Our lords and masters have spent a decade accelerating their theft of the Commons we made, doing murder in our names, and much worse, under the cover of a false explanation, and a reasonable fear of their power. It has to stop.

It's time to give Republicans, Democrats, rich people, federal cops, local poombahs, and anyone else who knowingly benefits from imperial machine a reason to lose sleep at night.

Well, maybe not just a single reason.

More like - millions of them...

Ron Paul Hates Israel

2011-09-09T08:41:00.001-04:00

This is probably not true. But, since we're wasting bits and bytes on "meme" experiments...

He probably has a Jesusy love affair with the notion of "biblical Israel." I'm sure he's fine with this sentiment, all things being equal:

"...An east wind from the LORD will come,
   blowing in from the desert;
his spring will fail
   and his well dry up.
His storehouse will be plundered
   of all its treasures.
The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,
   because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword;
   their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
   their pregnant women ripped open."

(Hosea 13:15-16, New International Version, Zondervan)

Ron Paul Is Not A Libertarian

2011-09-09T08:37:00.001-04:00

The title has nothing to do with anything. But, following the bleghal recommendation of Mr. BDR, I stumbled across this piece. Seemed like an interesting experiment

Also, in the comments, someone suggested a title like, "..would Ron Paul be an existential threat to Israel?"

Seems too wordy and syntactically complex for a proper search chain. So, I'm going to refine it a bit. See next post.

Sabots and sans-culottes

2011-09-09T00:12:00.006-04:00

When I wrote this externalized dialogue in my head, I had something almost exactly like this in mind:

"U.S. District Court Judge Ronald B. Leighton said Thursday afternoon there are legitimate issues between the union and EGT Development, owner of a $200 million superterminal in Longview. But he told the union's lawyers in a hearing that 'you are the messengers' and that they must get control of their clients.

The hearing came after the long-simmering labor dispute turned violent about 4:30 a.m. Thursday, and as Longshoremen stayed off the job in Anacortes, Tacoma, Everett and Seattle. Port spokesmen said they have no information about when Longshoremen may return to work.

At least 500 Longshoremen stormed the Port of Longview and broke out windows in the guard shack, according to Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha. As men wielding baseball bats and crowbars held six guards captive, others cut brake lines on boxcars and dumped grain, according to Duscha."

I understand that cautious and temperamentally conservative people will argue that rash and intemperate actions endanger labor's position in our brutal and simultaneously complacent society. Others, especially those possessed of a need to chase the meth high of dialecticism, might insist that everything must occur at its appointed hour, when conditions have ripened and proper historic and revolutionary awareness has developed.

To which I write - labor has never been weaker. Theory has never been less likely to persuade actual workers* with actual concerns to act/wait for the right moment.

I don't know if that's a cause for celebration. Probably not. I personally don't subscribe to the school of thought predicated on the belief that if conditions continue to deteriorate, good and noble souls will rise up to right the wrongs. Then again, I think Jefferson was also wrong about the "natural aristoi," so...

Here's what I know: some longshoremen "cut brake lines...and dumped grain." They've also shut down ports in the Northwest. And that a judge hearing the time-wasting and spectacular portion of the longshoremen's dispute with ownership is pissed enough to chastise union suits for failing to keep their flanneligans under proper control:

"In court Thursday afternoon, Leighton said the violence, vandalism and threats must stop now.

'They do no good for their cause' by acting like hooligans, he said of the union members.

'This is a mature process that requires restraint,' Leighton said. 'Your clients have none of that.'..."

When a hundred hands of longshoremen can get a federal judge in such a tizzy that he demands they act with restraint and within a "mature process," they are fucking well doing something right.

And that is worth celebrating.

* - ...yes, "the proletariat" is a symbol/model which is in desperate need of revision...

(h/t I Cite)

Arrested

2011-09-08T17:13:00.003-04:00

Why is cursing even an issue, here?

...because if you don't show the cops and the bureaucrats "respect," you know, people might start to treat them as if they're bags of floppy flesh, like the rest of us.

That's why.

Quite a story. Kicked out of the public fucking library because she had the wherewithal and foresight to bring along a deck of cards with which to entertain her young son. And he, being entertained, laughed and cooed too loudly.

Rightfully, she resisted. And the rest is predictable history.

Deprogram Note

2011-09-03T08:27:00.007-04:00

Where does the US meddle?

Where the populace organizes or threatens to organize to confront its own state, economic order, or local elite. Where the locals aren't extracting resources for the benefit of the wealthy, or for the benefit of the right factions of wealthy people.

Brazil's ruling factions used to have worry about being structurally adjusted. Now they're so well valued the President of the United State stays for dinner, even when he's getting his war on. Breaking unions, freeing up the currency and creating cosmopolitan ties with foreign investors is like working miracles, or something. You will also note, one hopes, that the House of Saud is as hateful and despicable a client elite as imaginable. You might also observe, just perhaps, that NATO hasn't bombed them or sent in its sky death robots. They didn't threaten to create a pan-African currency backed by protected gold. Maybe that has nothing to do with anything...

Why does the US meddle?

Because the local and regional elites serve an obvious function. They are corporate factors. They are, also, work camp kapos. Sometimes it's cheaper to extract the tin, timber, petroleum, or cheap labor with new local headmen than it is with the too-comfortable older ones. Sometimes the old bosses are no longer useful idiots; or maybe they've doddered off into senility, and have failed to bribe and/or properly oppress their captive populations. Sometimes they're too generous with the bribes. Sometimes they're not generous enough with the captive populations. Sometimes, it's just smart business to use the stick. Power unused is power lost.

Is it our responsibility to obstruct this meddling?

Short answer: yes. We are the collective beneficiaries of it. Our standard of living is not unlike blood money, and we owe the blood debt for taking it. Longer answer: figure it out for yourself. If you don't have what it takes to pay the debt, or if your ideology and worldview leave you pretending to be a lone wolf instead of a human person, you've made your choice by avoiding a decision. When the authorities come around, at least keep your mouth shut. That isn't too much to ask, is it?

How do we obstruct this meddling?

By making it too expensive, at home, for them to meddle so efficiently abroad.

Spielzeug Self

2011-08-31T16:51:00.002-04:00

Shorter former corporate attorney: make sure your kids play in a purposeful, directed way that will build them up into high IQ future CEOs and project managers and who are both successful and compassionate, as well as focused on achieving goals set by superiors and kind to strangers, because there's nothing in those fucking double binds that could possibly shatter a fragile ego shaped and formed and stretched to the rack of the tyranny of success.

A Pig Hunting Pigs

2011-08-30T22:46:00.016-04:00

Any time a person yields to the masochistic urge to read Matthew Yglesias, she or he would do well to picture Yglesias nestling himself into a thousand dollar smoking chair with a mint and fruit flavored boat drink clutched tightly in his legacy fattened fingers, expensive tablet in lap, arching his brow. As he sits there, imagine him muttering, "How can I make sure my friends will remember that they used to say, 'Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias said'...", and failing to conjure for himself an appropriate mental rescue from the moral predicament of being both less intelligent and well respected than Klein and yet the less venal and monstrously casual with considerations of justice and human feeling, of the pair of grasping sycophants, he keys into electronic life the expensive tablet merited to himself by virtue of being born a rich man's son.

Knowing he cannot equal Klein's mercenary facility with numbers, or his friend's capacity to transform the suffering of ordinary folk into data points in defense of the status quo, he starts instead to tap his thoughts out in another direction. It's at this point that he writes something like this:

"I’ve gotten some pushback from folks who say that it’s wrong of me to focus attention on Ron Paul’s desire to make abortion illegal when there are so many others issues out there."

And this, because:

"...according to Ron Paul, [abortion] 'is the most important issue of our age'...”.

Before we take ourselves too far down Matty's gold brick road, we should settle an issue with the map: Ron Paul is a sideshow.

Let's stick a knife in Lady Probability's knotted skein, and tearing her threads to wind blown snippets, entertain the notion that Ron Paul will be elected to the Presidency in November of the year of the next and last most important election ever, a year only more noteworthy this time around for the other national sideshow - the one where idiot white paranoiacs have their spoiled interloper colonization of Mayan time spat back at them by a universe that will go on long after we've slagged the only planet we know for certain carries any life.

Let's toy with the notion for a bit: "Ron Paul is elected to the White House."

And...

Nothing will change.

Because Ron Paul is, as better sorts have already noted, incapable of altering the operation of the machine. That he even wants to run that machine, if only in donor funded theory, should quell any notion that he has a plan or the power base sufficient to substantively or even incrementally change how it's run. How it is run is changed by the refusal to obey it. And by actively damaging it. Often. At any available juncture between it and the population it rules. Until it fails to function at all.

Ron Paul isn't about that.

Yggles either doesn't know that Ron Paul would have little power to change the system, or he doesn't care. Neither do the libertarians or conservatives who have signed on to the "Love Revolution" this time around. Either from a risible naivete or a calculated ignorance, Ron Paul supporters and Ron Paul critics alike, including Mr. Matthew Yglesias, simply assume that he is both viable enough to be elected to the supreme command of the imperial expeditionary forces and empowered by his magical wisdom, and the impossibly turned blind eyes of those who actually own the country, to transform the empire into its better self by virtue of his transformational occupancy of the Oval Office. They do this, one imagines, for a host of reasons: because they still believe that the extraction and protection racket's stated raisons d'etre - welfare, safety, education, progress and the safeguarding of human goodness - are its actual ones; because they are gatekeepers who don't want voters to realize that voting is a complete waste of time; or, because they might even honestly believe that the answer to the scourge/vital right of abortion will finally be provided by the election of a singular candidate, or by the prevention of that election.

Matthew Yglesias, I think it's safe to conclude, is not worried about the actual election of Ron Paul to the Presidency. When Yglesias writes that Ron Paul has a "desire to send the world economy into a new depression with tight money policies" he is signaling his faith in the system to which he (like Ron Paul and every other candidate for elective office) has pledged his fealty, and from which he draws his salary, and the validity of his legacy education. He is letting his readers in on the fact that he, like them, knows the score. The smart people aren't going to allow a Ron Paul Presidency. Because he would be bad for their business.

So.

Ron Paul will not be elected to the Presidency.

Why, then, worry Paul's well-known and rather consistent position with regard to the state's regulation of a woman's uterus?

Thankfully, we have Matty Yglesias. Mr. Yglesias is kind enough to tell us why, and since he is not the truly reprehensible Ezra Klein, he is even a bit forthright about it:

"I respect that a great many people are frustrated with drug policy in the United States and are doubly frustrated by the fact that President Obama hasn’t stopped DEA raids on 'medical' marijuana dispensaries in states that have used this route to create de facto decriminalization. The fact is, however, that most anti-drug laws and most drug law enforcement happens on the state level, and the President Paul won’t be able to repeal federal drug legislation without backing from Congress, which won’t happen."

Matty respects that people don't like drug policy. He respects their opinions so much he places the medical in medical marijuana in scare quotes. He respects them so much he's going to prevaricate a bit, and pretend that most drug policy comes from the States. He's going to do this, of course, by ignoring federal guidelines, federal funding, federal prosecution, and in case we forget for ourselves, the fact that nearly half of all enforcement dollars are spent directly by the Feds, even if the enforcement happens "on the state level."*

But, he doesn't want them to lose sight of the broader picture, here. That's why, tablet in hand and despite the fact that he's no Ezra Klein, Yglesias needs to remind liberals and progressives - especially those voters who rightly wonder at the grotesque failures of the Drug War - about Ron Paul's abortion problem.

And what it comes down to, for liberals like Yglesias, but also for any number of party endorsed conservatives, is legitimacy.

The problem with Ron Paul isn't that he will ever win the Presidency. With the exception of a half dozen paleo-conservatives, Ann Coulter when she is three sheets to the wind, Pat Buchanan when he's not working hard to convince the executives at MSNBC to void his contract, or that stoner dude who forgot to the clean the opium out of his bong before he packed in some kind bud, there are few people who actually believe Ron Paul will ever be President.

Ron Paul's appeal doesn't come from viability.

Ron Paul's appeal comes from his willingness to address the State's legitimacy problem. Ron Paul's appeal owes itself to a growing doubt about the state's legitimacy.

It's not that he thinks the project of government is a waste of time. He's right at home with the minarchists and lean government conservatives who haven't thought their core convictions through to their logical conclusions. Like Congressman Paul, they fail to make the connection between an efficient state reduced to policing, war and arbitration functions and the fortunes of the class which actually manages that state as a shared ownership venture. As long as the federal State, and the several States, are obligated by public discontent and unrest to dispense a portion of the Commons back towards the people who actually produce not only wealth but the Commons, the State is prevented from triaging whole segments of the population, in anticipation of the twin and rapidly approaching disasters, for the ruling class, which have been produced by the capitalist distribution of labor, goods and resources: pollution and food supply collapse, and Peak Oil. Furthermore, a state which has some recognized obligation to provide for its captive population is a state which will degrade and ultimately collapse under the weight of the emerging feedback loop between food supply collapse, and Peak Oil - the surplus oil population.

Ron Paul is not going to address these problems. He has neither the worldview nor the understanding of the crisis of capitalism which would equip him to use an imaginary Presidency to prevent the disastrous culmination of capitalist production and distribution. Assuming his election to the actual Presidency, the office he will have won will give him tremendous power to assassinate, bomb, invade and appoint to positions of power those men and women who will execute his authority to assassinate, bomb and invade. He will have no power, no coalition and no effective authority to reduce spending of any note, to prevent Congress from forcing his budgetary hand, or to restore the gold standard.**

And for Matty Yglesias, and the rest of the bumper crop of warbling progressives and professional liberals, this is the real problem.

Ron Paul, on the point of the power of the office he would assume, is saying as loudly and as often as he can that he would not use it.

Ron Paul's problem is that by assuming the mantle of the Presidency and thereupon refusing the exercise of its one set of actual powers, Ron Paul would threaten the legitimacy of their use, altogether. It would actually be better, for critics of Paul, if he were an anarchist. Nobody listens to those raving dreamers. Alas, for our progressive friends, Ron Paul believes in government, just like them. And that makes him far more dangerous.

He's sharing their stall and he's drawing away customers.

That's what he does every time he turns fairly run of the mill paleo-conservative protectionist and isolationist platitudes into modern idiom. Whether he is addressing the abuses, failures and consequences of the drug war, or drawing attention to the catastrophes wrought by seventy years of ceaseless intervention in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, the Caribbean and wherever the US has projected its martial might, he gives credence to the simplest of ideas: the use of power is almost invariably worse than the refusal to use it.

And if Ron Paul, just by being Ron Paul on a permanent and quixotic campaign for an office he cannot and will never win, can call into question the legitimacy of power itself, well, then it's up to people with large audiences to remind those stupid pot-smokers and youth voters tempted by his siren song that Ron Paul is lacking in...

...legitimacy. You know, because for all his rhetoric about meddling and power, he's just one more wealthy white dude who wants to get all up in a woman's uterus.

So, Matty Yglesias can't be Ezra Klein. He doesn't have the chops to quite manage the banality of Ezra's numerical evil. But he can, at least, keep a gate with the best of them, and like a good master's little pig, go out hunting one of the other pigs who went off the master's private enclosure.

* - I'm sure a competent researcher might be able to help confirm what percentage of the states' combined budgets is actually federal grant, block and contribution monies...

** - no modern capitalist state will allow this because those who own the state don't want a money supply constrained by gold, or silver, or platinum, or anything but the fiat power of the creditor's state...and besides, Yglesias has an actual point buried within his gate keeping effort: tightening the money supply, right now, would trigger a depression that would actually hurt the ruling class

What Carrie Underwood Never Said

2011-08-29T11:09:00.000-04:00

"...Look, I know this is uncomfortable for you self-flattering rebel sympathizers who imagine yourselves at the wheel of a Spanish ambulance each time you type your login name and password into your Google account, but you are being played for fools and suckers; your extravagant sympathies and your juvenile desires to align yourselves with revolutionary causes blind you to your meager posts as adjunct propaganda writers for the Western war machine..."

~ IOZ

Your Freedom and Democracy™ Best Super Duper Popular Rebellion Great Job Yeah, Part II!

2011-08-28T14:31:00.002-04:00

Tip of the hat to Mr. Floyd:

"...The killings were pitiless.

They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic Crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came.

Around 30 men lay decomposing in the heat. Many of them had their hands tied behind their back, either with plastic handcuffs or ropes. One had a scarf stuffed into his mouth. Almost all of the victims were black men. Their bodies had been dumped near the scene of two of the fierce battles between rebel and regime forces in Tripoli...

The atrocities have apparently not been confined to Tripoli: Amnesty International has reported similar violence in the coastal town of Zawiyah, much of it against men from sub-Saharan Africa who, it has been claimed, were migrant workers..."

I don't think an honest observer of any civil war should expect that the victors will, in a perfect deviation from the perfect track record of human perfidy, behave as if the vanquished are actually members of the human race. People who win wars tend to act with the temporary impunity which victory confers upon the victors.*

This isn't to suggest that the coalition of throatslitters, bankers, smugglers, regime defectors, university professors and lawyers who make up the Transitional National Council and its armed faction are actually the victors of the Libyan contest.

The clear winners will eventually emerge, and they will likely sail or march under the flags of ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BHP Billiton, Total SA and Areva.

But, in the meantime, the super noble Freedom and Democracy™ rebels (beloved of muscular liberal interventionists who will never actually have to visit Tripoli) who think they've won themselves their own private Idaho are busy renationalizing Libyan jobs:

(photo credit: Reuters/Goran Tomasevic)

* - An observation, one hopes, which informs my own ambiguous relationship with the image of the French Doctor's Remedy...

Some Kind of Maxim

2011-08-27T10:55:00.003-04:00

Rotting at the moral heart of a future Mussolini is a frustrated anarchist* who measures freedom by a golden age mythology and whose complaint, in the end, can be understood as bitter failure to understand the strength of women. He will call his resentments, "insight," and his contempt for the weak, the "soft" and the feminine, "liberty."

* - he might call himself, also, a "libertarian"...

Your Freedom and Democracy™ Best Super Duper Popular Rebellion Great Job Yeah!

2011-08-25T18:35:00.007-04:00

Meet your rebel leadership, liberal friends of the "Libyan People's Revolt."

The President of the Transitional National Council (that is, the organization so committed to Freedom and Democracy™ that its only acts, thus far, have been to make a bank on paper so that Obama, NATO and the UN can assign it ownership of Libyan state assets, and officially beg for those assets to be unfrozen):

Mustafa Abdul Jalil. Qaddafi's former Justice Minister.

And his Prime Minister:

Mahmoud Jibril. Qaddafi's former National Economic Development Council chief, and well known as a neo-liberal proponent of privatization, trade reform and closer ties to Washington and London, in Libya.

Plus, some defected army chiefs, several lawyers, a few economists, the former Qaddafi appointed head of the Libyan National Air Force, and about a thousand fighters comprised of drug traffickers, smugglers, and poorly armed teenagers who, when not killing black Libyans, were busy calling air strikes down on each other.

(Shh...we're not mentioning the foreign powers, their flying piloted death machines, tons of munitions, special forces operators, including the British SAS [and rumoring, the French Foreign Legion], remote controlled sky death robots, off shore bombing from French, Italian and American naval vessels, and the completely innocent official recognition by about 30 states desperate for concessions or Western assistance...)

And what are they going to do with their glorious and totally spontaneous, popular uprising against a bad man who no man in his right mind would ever be associated with?

Why, hand out concessions and re-construction contracts to ~~those Western powers that bombed the bejesus out of Libya with so much tonnage of explosives that reconstruction would of course be necessary~~ the "foreign countries which backed" ~~a cynically transparent extraction and resources power grab~~ an innocent and spontaneous popular uprising, and all this for ~~the calculated pillaging of a resource rich nation~~ the noble and democratic sake of ~~an extraction regime of bankers, Qadaffi stooges and university professors~~ the glorious people's revolution.

...with the acuity of an eagle's eye turned in on itself...

2011-08-25T11:06:00.010-04:00

Robert Farley loves you.

He loves you with such great passion, and depth of feeling, that he wants you to sleep well tonight. You - you sweet, gentle souls - you matter to him. And he wants to salve your troubled spirit.

Unlike the naive and misguided complainants against the institutional order of things, Farley wants you to rest assured. Especially if you are a good liberal. He doesn't ask you to risk your mortal soul in challenge against the rightness of our betters. He's a good man, this Robert Farley. When bombs are falling on foreign soil, Farley reminds you, you must remember that they are international.

A consensus sends them.

Can you really oppose a consensus of loving governments? I mean, c'mon now...

Sure, sure, it's okay to wonder if our benevolent leaders have sufficient foresight. Farley worries. He wants the best. It's a reasonable concern. Our leaders are only human after all. Though, one mustn't reach from their mortality, towards a dangerous assumption that betters might not be betters. They are, we must remind ourselves, leaders because they lead us. Some might fail, but that is no reason to doubt leadership.

So, when discussing the invasion of one of the most abused, destitute, war ridden countries on the face of the only planet we know with certainty sports any life, Farley also has concerns. But, they are the right questions. Nary a Marxist or silly anarchist in sight would ever voice them. They are, we've heard, unreasonable folk. Where an anti-statist might wonder at minutia, like corpsified children and the tendency for freedom bombs to fall astray of their righteous targets, Farley hones in on the really important stuff:

"...To recap, the "Afghan Model" involves the combination of special forces, indigenous proxy fighting forces and heavy precision airpower. Proxies screen the special operators from attack, fix enemy positions and exploit tactical victories by seizing ground. Special forces operators identify targets and coordinate proxy ground assaults with precision strikes. Precision air attacks either destroy enemy formations or suppress them enough to allow proxy forces to overrun their positions. This model worked very well in the first several months of the Afghanistan War, but it worked rather less well at the start of the Libyan Civil War. Although airstrikes were able to freeze loyalist forces, rebel offensives in the east initially failed, and for a time it looked as if the besieged city of Misrata would fall.

With what looks like a rebel victory in the offing, the specifically military aspect of the Afghan Model seems to have been vindicated, albeit in slow motion. Compared to the war in Afghanistan, the pace of the rebel advance in Libya was glacial. To date, the NATO intervention in Libya has lasted five months and four days. In Afghanistan, the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar fell on December 9, 2001, just two months and two days after the beginning of U.S. airstrikes. Of course, there are also important differences. The pace of airstrikes over Afghanistan was more intense than those over Libya -- by roughly a factor of three -- and the strikes themselves were heavier. While we may never know the precise composition of special forces in either the Afghan or the Libyan campaigns, the contingents were likely larger and more active in the former conflict. The organized military forces on both sides of the Afghanistan War were more experienced than their counterparts in Libya, a fact that may have made it easier to undertake the offensive that eventually seized Kandahar, as offensive infantry tactics generally take longer to master than defensive tactics. The geography of Libya, which forced most military operations into a relatively narrow corridor along the coast, also favored the use of airpower.

However, the Afghan Model is as much a political as a military concept. Politically, the model is supposed to minimize domestic opposition in the intervening country, minimize nationalist reactions in the target country and minimize international upheaval. In Libya, the grade is mixed on all three. The leaders of the primary NATO countries -- Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron -- clearly did not expect the war to last this long. Obama was forced to manufacture a questionable legal justification for the war after it exceeded the limits of the War Powers Resolution. Cameron and Sarkozy also came under domestic pressure, and other NATO countries grew steadily more critical over the course of the campaign. However, the relatively low cost of the campaign in both Western lives and Western money undoubtedly blunted domestic criticism. In Libya, the overall political impact of the air offensive remains unclear. The broader international community remained relatively quiet, although the violence in Syria and the ongoing collapse of the global economy may have drawn their attention away from Libya.

The other political aspect of the Afghan Model involves post-conflict stability. Because that model eschews use of large-scale ground forces, it assigns de facto responsibility for post-conflict management to the rebel forces. This has the upside of being cheaper for the intervening power and ideally avoids the nationalist backlash typically associated with a large-scale occupation. However, it also puts tremendous stress on the rebel coalition. The rebels, who may not have previously worked extensively with each other for any purpose other than winning the war, suddenly need to assemble a working government coalition. The rebels also have to decide what to do with the surviving elements of the defeated government. All of these obstacles represent potentially disastrous pitfalls inherent to the Afghan Model. If Libya crumbles back into civil war in the wake of Gadhafi's fall, it will not reflect well on a strategic concept that promises large returns at minimal risk. On the other hand, if the experience of working together against Gadhafi's forces helped build relationships between the rebels that can serve as the foundation for a representative government, the slow course of the war in Libya may have had hidden benefits..."

See from how deep springs Robert Farley's human love? Witness what exercises his loving and compassionate soul. The model, kind readers. The model, itself! The model might be in doubt if our benevolent leaders apply it improperly. Oh, how we must shudder.

I mean, can you believe the horror should that occur?

Our leaders, our institutions, their very structural selves, might lose a method, might stumble upon an instant of doubt, and in doubting, discover a traitorous self-reproach.

This must not happen.

This must not happen, most especially, in Libya. Afghanistan is Bush's Folly. Good Obama, that transformational and transitional man - he's got a peace prize. We ought not lose sight of that.

Farley's meaning is clear, and it almost takes the form of a confession: the state must step rightly, and publicly, in order to preserve its ability to step in and into the future.

A "stable, democratic regime" must follow upon the path blasted into the earth, a path forward made ready by freedom bombs and superior force projection, a road towards stability begat by just and democratic war. We must not waver. We must work and labor for this hopeful tomorrow, extending it into the bright future of a world where air power cannot be in doubt, and where good doctrine prevents the resurgence of those who would not be so casually upended by death from the sky, or even - gasp! - ruled at all.

*

If Farley's point reminds a honest reader of a Rumsfeldian argument, circa Autumn 2003 through Spring 2004, the reader should not doubt her impressions. Farley is exactly arguing, with the acuity of an eagle's eye turned in on itself, that the Western powers foray into Libya was and is "a genuinely multinational effort."

He is, no doubt, joined by august company. I imagine they'll also take great pains to remind goat faced doubters that out of a thousand French armed and British coordinated smugglers, drug runners, former Qadaffi staffers and royalists, aided by American, Norwegian and French air strikes, a revolution makes itself.

But, you know, when discussing the six thousand seven hundred forty five separate air sorties against a country of six and a half million people, what matters most is that the French bombed more people and land than the pilots of the half billion dollar flying American death machines.

All things being temporarily equal, I wonder what the six and half million or so citizens of the State of Washington would think if China, India and Russia, in an attempt to liberate them from the pernicious regimes of Gregoire and Obama, dropped thousands of tons of ordnance over a period of five months, during six thousand seven hundred forty five separate bombing runs...

It should also be noted, that Farley had his doubts about intervention back in March. Not condemnation of American interventionism. Doubts. And not even about intervention, or freedom and democracy bombing. Farley's laser of concern was focused on what sort of regime the US could get something out of the venture. Farley is a good liberal:

"We can’t throw open the gates of Libya, then “let the Libyans decide for themselves;” the very act of throwing open the gates requires intervention that will work to the benefit of certain actors, thus necessitating the question 'Who shall we install in Tripoli?' ”

* - with roughly the area of the Pacific Northwest including British Columbia

[I originally wrote a crowvian snark attack upon this Lawyers, Guns and Money piece by LGM founder Robert Farley, mocking and ridiculing the institutional liberal perspective which allows an ostensibly intelligent man to treat with air war with the posed objectivity of an announcer at a mid-week summer Little League game.

It didn't work, mostly because announcers at mid-week summer Little League games are almost always thirteen or fourteen year old boys and girls, and their delivery runs from excited self-involvement to comedic boredom. Even the poses they take are endearing, what with their youth making up for their failure to yet become serious.

So, it didn't work, and then Farley made it easy by doubling down.]

R2P

2011-08-24T13:09:00.002-04:00

There are, if der guegler speaks a binary truth, thirteen million two hundred thousand results for a search of "Responsibility to Protect." Der guegler provided, right at the top, a non-profit linked to in posts below, and no less than the usual suspects (The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The CFR, Foreign Policy, The NYT and Brookings) offering the expected fare, ranging from measured approval (The Economist) to bleating cheer leading (no surprise here, The New York Times).

Let's save them all a lot of trouble.

Kipling, in his own Kiplingerian way, has already sussed it all out for us:

"Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!"

Bold

2011-08-24T08:44:00.001-04:00

You got to give it Obama.

That fucking guy is bold.

We really ought to step back and admire Obama's audacity, for a moment. There's not a Republican in the country who could have pulled off an escalation in Afghanistan, the destabilization of Syria, an increase of support for Baluchi irredentists in Pakistan and Iran, a robot war on the Arabian peninsula, the toppling of Qadaffi, the re-entry into Somalia, the breaking of public unions and the handing over of billions of dollars to banks and insurance companies at the exact same time as shepherding in a vasty vast domestic austerity scheme.

Imagine, if you will, John McCain sitting at the helm during all the same. Think he'd have pulled it off with Public Enemy Palin looking over his shoulder?

Not a chance.

But, get a transformational world historical fan of the sky death robot - one who knows how to stake a motherhood position better than Ronnie Saint Reagan - into the job, and you almost have to applaud the guy for the audacity of his grinning, casual evil.

Q Out

2011-08-21T21:51:00.004-04:00

It's nifty that the ~~NATO/UN/US backed central banking cabal~~ freedom and democracy liberation of Libya looks just like a resources raid. It must be appearances. Or my jaded eye. This couldn't be exactly what it seems to be...

...but, hey, five or ten years of pillaging will be good for USSOCOM and the burgeoning mercenary market...

If you meet a Luddite on the road, kill him.

2011-08-20T21:44:00.009-04:00

Tools aren't the problem. Complex tools are just that - tools. Yes, tool usage has consequences. Living has consequences. If you don't like that, kill yourselves. Because that's the only way you'll ever escape contingency.

High energy technology isn't the problem. There's no going back, anyway. People quite rightly enjoy not living in mud huts and festering shanty towns run down the middle with open sewers and rounded about by shit dumps and cesspools.

Wealth concentration, power concentration and capitalist control and ownership of the means of production are the problems.

The proximate causes of human suffering cannot all be attributed to human organizations - because microbes and viruses and earthquakes and hurricanes are inhuman, and laudably disobedient - still, we do have some capacity to organize differently. And a good start is to get rid of the rich.

If you are instead counting on collapse and a "return" to some prior or old-new pristine state of grace, please - fuck yourself in the eyeballs with a loaded rifle. Pull the trigger while you are doing it. Collapse isn't going to restore a lost balance. There was never a balance. Never any harmony. Never a bright moment of equilibrium with "nature." It's a golden age myth, and it takes a moron to believe in it.

There is only beating death for a while. And then there's losing out to it. Why not use these nifty fore brains to make it easier for everyone instead of pretending a lone wolf "autonomy" to avoid thinking about consequences, eh? Why not tackle the real issues, the control of the means of the production and the control of states to enforce inequity, instead of waiting for death and disaster to solve the problem for educated white people. Because...

The collapse of our high energy complex of systematic techniques and specialized tool use platforms equals exactly the death of billions. Starting with all the poor fucks still living "close to nature," you know, the ones already on the ass end of the distribution and extraction networks.

Want to know who's going to escape the worst consequences of collapse and the "restoration of balance"?

The people who are already buffered by the rest of us. The wealthy, and powerful.

Every time a fucking luddite bitches about tools, or technology, remember what he's advocating by way of a thoughtless elision:

The murder and death of billions.

A luddite fucking clown is making the argument of our masters. They'll survive "collapse." In fact, they are counting on it.

So...

If you meet a Luddite on the road - kill him.

Concision

2011-08-20T12:00:00.002-04:00

Effing blogger. Stupid Jack.

Long post on collectivity and individuality, few notes. Too pissed to rewrite it, now.

A concise visual history, instead:

Also, since I'm being pissy about shit that shouldn't bother me, I guess I'm a bit hurt that this song is being used to sell cars and body products...

I guess it's all good as long as this one isn't about to be used to sell Axe body wash or leather upholstered yuppie strollers:

Pigskin in Frills

2011-08-20T08:32:00.002-04:00

The women featured below play real football. They play it hard, and with intensity. This is without doubt fierce competition, in a difficult sport, by serious players with demonstrable talent.

Still, I wonder if it would be the "fastest growing pro sports league in the nation" if they weren't playing in their underwear:

http://www.lflus.com/

I know, I know. It's a silly question. It's like asking what makes the difference between a dirty anarchic riot and a glorious uprising for freedom, for the producers of FOX News, CNN, the Beeb or MSNBC...

Pilgrim's Regress...Or Towards a Barbarous Shore

2011-08-19T15:11:00.009-04:00

A galley, used for both trade and war.

And they are the same, war and trade, though often settled differently.

Rough seas, and a storm forebode by the flight of birds and the shapes of clouds to come. Slaves, chained to their oars. Rowing, and rowing some more. A merchant man, on deck - a deck he owns, because he owns the boat; ,we hear also the voices of paying passengers, their guard, and a troop on transport to a foreign war. The merchant man drinks wine with his captain, and the soldiers' headman, joined also by the merchant man's brother, a learned doctor of the law, tenured at some ancient peninsular university. Over wine, and chess and a sea roughened table, they speak of war, and profits, and of fortunes measured by rarer coin. The general tells his tales, predictable in their blood and pathos. The captain whispers of the fickle seas, and the murmuring of the slaves below. He crosses himself, but prays silently to fortuna and the gods of the oceans below.

His cabin boy rushes to fill their cups.

The general pauses, as the passengers join them. A physician, a banking house factor, a slaver and a trader in spice. The slaver fills his own cup, smiling. He has a fine catch, in the hold below, captive rebels purchased cheap from a shattered republic. He'll have to break them. He'll start with hunger. They're packed in tight, secure in chains, aft of the trader's spices. He has already contracted a deal with the trader. His prisoners, to carry the wares. At cheaper rates than the dock agent could ever offer.

The future is bright. Storm clouds are his sunshine.

But, the slaves on the oars have different designs. They have plans, too. Unlike many slaves on a host's host of different galleys, they've got it together. It's been a long voyage, this one. They've had time. Time to shape themselves, to harden. They've hoarded tools, and food, made mental maps of the guards' schedules, the merchant's habits, the passengers' private quarrels, the General's blinding hauteur, the Captain's dependence on the merchant's commands.

And they know a humble truth: every tool is a weapon. Even if only by making it go missing.

It should come as little shock that they have a sense of timing. Everything in their narrowed world is a matter of tempo. The drum beat sounding along the boards, through their chains, commanding their labor. The susurrus of the waves. The rhythm of oars slapping the heartless ocean in tempered unison. The discipline, the punishment.

Their long night is coming.

The skies, and the storm, darken on their last chained day. Rolling ocean gives way to the tormented waves of swell upon swell. They snap their oars, breaking them so the ocean's rage cannot kick them back against bodies chained to rows and benches. The galley pivots on a crest, cast adrift by slaves in rebellion.

Above, the captain knows that below decks, things have gone awry. He's peering over the edge, and he believes what he sees, back lit briefly by flashes of lightning. The oars are gone. Broken bits stick out, here and there. The slaves are no longer rowing. The merchant grabs for him, as a wave breaks over the planking. The captain braces his employer against wind, and water. He calls out to his guard and they close ranks around them as they take shelter in his cabin.

Already gathered there, hunching over a dimming lantern flame, he finds the general and the merchant's paying passengers. The doctor of law is visibly sickened.

The ship crashes downward, into the trough of a wave. It goes on like this for half of a forever.

The long night passes with the storm; daybreak brings a sea change.

Below, the galley slaves have freed the slaver's foreign prisoners, who ready to riot and rage. They've smashed open the stores of spice, and wine, and broken into the ship's larder. Rum cups travel from hand to hand, as does sugar, and tobacco. Someone strums a stringed instrument. Others take up a stomping dance.

A voice calls down from above, demanding terms and the release of prisoners.

Wiser heads prevailed, the dark night prior, and the slaves do have themselves some prisoners. The task master, a factor, a servant, an indentured laborer. The task master is a bit worse for wear. No one below seems to mind his state of bodily disrepair.

No one answers.

The doctor of law stands up again. It is unlikely the slaves will answer him. He is disturbed, and his heart is burdened. The natural order of things has been upset. The below refuses the mastery of the above. And it is that mastery which gives the world order, and harmony, and the form of a machine which improves the caliber of men. When the merchant finally agrees to let the general and his soldiers settle this trouble, he will write a missive to the appropriate Secretariat, praising his resolution of the matter. But, he will also lament the needless loss of life, and the necessary brutality which exists outside beloved law, the better to restore it. He returns to the cabin, bearing news of the the silence from decks below. He adds his voice to a debate which has raged more strongly with each hour that passes; the seas and skies may have becalmed themselves, but the betters above cannot agree about what to do with their upstart inferiors below. He argues with conviction: "For order to prevail, law must be ignored so that later it can be strengthened."

The captain disputes the general. "Who will row the oars, and get us safe to port or shore?" he wonders. "We cannot break the rebels, below. Not now, not yet. We must settle this, surely. But we need them chained back up again. Punished, yes, yes. But, worse for them when we reach our port of call."

The trader lends his support to the general, as does the slaver. Their stocks and profits can only diminish the longer this stand off is not brought to its inevitable ending.

The physician, alone, takes up the captain's standard. He argues as convincingly as the lawyer, but he knows his position weakens the longer the vessel drifts towards an outcome no one yet really wants to ponder. "We must," he mulls, "refuse the temptation to add injury to degradation. The slaves have rebelled because their conditions are terrible." The ship must reach its harbor, and then set out again, repaired and doubly commissioned towards new ports, and new horizons, increasing always its objects and its ends. He concedes this, willingly. But, has he not also bought passage on this ship? Doesn't his fare too pay towards their common destination? Hear him, then: "Why not," he wonders, "promise them an improvement? A carrot to sweeten the sting of the stick..."

He is interrupted by a knock on the door. A soldier opens it, shepherding in the indentured man.

"The task master is dead. He died from wounds, early this morning," he says. "The galley slaves have released the slaver's prisoners. They have made a riot of below, stealing what is not theirs. I have been let go to give you their demands. You must submit until the voyage has ended. You will row the remaining oars. When they reach their goal, they will leave you to your own, all but the merchant and this slaver. You two, they will take with them. The rest they will leave with a warning. 'It does not end with this'..."

He pauses, to gulp breath. His heart sobs. He was so close to earning his final stake, and buying out of his indenture. Dreams of a free man's largesse fade to webs and cobbing, and the desert wind of his impoverished future blows even those strands away. He withers. He still believes he will some day be a rich man, but the day will only arrive come Judgment and his passage to God's great heaven.

His betters do not ask his opinion, but he is too angry to withhold it.

He hopes, with faith and fervor, that the galley slaves and the filthy foreign slaves below get what is coming to them. If only they had not seized the master's larder. If only they had refused the savage urge to take what was not theirs. They could have negotiated. Spoken their grievances. Oh, they would have been punished, and rightly. But, with patience and obedience, they could have earned their master's respect. With cunning and fidelity to darkness, they have plotted evil instead. He has overheard their secret intentions. This life is a pilgrimage, but they don't understand that. It's a progress towards improvement. They are ignorant, preferring regress. They will fix oars and sail for a barbarous shore which civilized men everywhere, and anywhere, would do well to avoid, and do better to conquer.

The physician knows his case is lost, but he clings to it with desperation. The slaver grins and the general swaggers. The doctor nods, his head heavy with its cultivated gravity.

The merchant listens in. He gives no hint of his intentions.

But we know. We know - don't we? - how this will end...