Feet of Clay

Couple of interesting observations about the Obama years and legacy that are worth checking out, as we head into what will surely be an entertaining year in which we will hopefully do as little as possible. Whatever caveats and qualifiers people want to post hoc onto Obama's tenure as imperial custodian, the bottom line is that he was far better than the fool who preceded him, the chumps he ran against, and especially that damned thing that succeeded him. That said, his flaws deserve to be revisited, if only so that they can be avoided in the future.

I always felt that Primary Colors was an underrated gem of a movie, with pitch-perfect performances from the entire ensemble. It captured perfectly how the canned idealism of the Clintons so quickly soured into endlessly triangulated cynicism.

One of the better lines from that movie -- can't find it online right now, so going from memory -- was from Billy Bob Thornton's character, referring to Kathy Bates' true believer character, that when that sort of person finds out their guy isn't really the rock that their church was built on, it devastates them. They're not sure what to do going forward.

I think that's what's happened with all the post hoc analyses of Obama's terms. For one, he benefits simply because the people he ran against, and the people he governed against, were so awful. He comes out looking better simply by being a normal human, instead of a steadily worsening sequence of Star Wars cantina critters.

But what did he actually do to effectively combat that wretched hive of scum and villainy? Not much, it turns out; in fact, considering the massive scale of Democratic losses at all the lower levels, maybe worse than nothing at all. Maybe his health-care initiative will survive in some form. Everything else is already gone.

Obama was effective in conveying that feel-your-pain stuff that good pols need to have, but the be-the-change-you-want stuff kinda backfired. You can't tell the harried single mother working three jobs to keep her family afloat that you know what she's going through, and then when you get elected tell her that she has to step up and be the change. That's what she voted for you to do, dummy, to stand up to the animals keeping her down. She should have showed up for all the midterms, of course, but one might be able to see how such a person might have noticed by those points in time that nothing much was really going to change for their situation.

The Democratic candidate that can forcefully convey that they will fight on their constituents' behalf, and not back down or take some weasel way out, will be the one that can win, and win big. Stop whining about the corporate media and call them out, challenge the individual scriveners to step up and do real work, instead of theater criticism and pithy observations on how to eat corn dogs. Stop complaining about #MoscowMitch and his mastery of procedure, and learn to master it yourselves. He seemed quite able to stonewall things when he led a forty-one seat minority. Do that.

That's really the only worthwhile lesson to take from Obama, that all the well-meaning thoughts and words and intentions mean nothing against people who are dedicated to destroying you. Norms, rules, decorum, all of it -- utterly meaningless if only one side is bothering to observe those things.

Someone (can't recall who or where right now, but very recently) observed that Democrats could have 70% support on an issue, and still be waffling over how well it'll play in Real 'murka or whatever, worrying about what the Fixed Noise drones will say, while the Republicons will trot out some nonsense that barely has the support of their 30% wingnut base, but they'll drive it full throttle, damn the torpedoes.

The sooner the Democrats figure out why that is, and adjust accordingly, the sooner they can set about the righteous work of driving these clowns and monsters directly into the goddamned sea. No mercy, no remorse, no idiotic attempts at comity and collegiality. The Republican Party needs to be ended as a political entity, period, or nothing will ever change.

Fair Game

Folks, if you're on the hunt for intellectual dishonesty and shameless hackery, look no further than this sanctimonious asshole. Here's a choice excerpt:

In the meantime, the view of the mainstream media seems to be that there needs to be more harsh coverage aimed at the family members of Trump administration officials.

For instance, there’s Darla Shine, a self-declared “happy housewife” living on New York’s Long Island. Just two weeks ago, Mrs. Shine—it seems okay to refer to her as “Mrs.,” given her declared celebration of married domesticity—was minding her own business, blogging about such topics as “canning at home,” “lasagna gardening,” and “tips for grilling,” and penning paeans to children, family, God, and country.

Then, on July 6, Mrs. Shine’s privacy evaporated. Mediaite did a big writeup on her, quoting her conservative and/or politically incorrect views on topics ranging from Barack Obama to autism.

That second paragraph does a lot of heavy lifting, but let's do a quick rundown. First is the none-too-subtle implication that until the big bad libtard media decided to doxx her, poor ol' Darla Shine was jes' a simple country gal, gardening and making lasagna and pleasuring her husband -- in a very Christian way, of course, which means no swallowing unless it's his birthday.

You would never guess that she had been a producer at Fixed Noise, until she banged her way into the exec suite and cashed in her chips to go raise rugrats on Lawn Guyland. You would never guess that she's spent a good chunk of that time trying various methods of monetizing her mommy bliss, spreading the word to day-drinking housewives who need a little motivation between polishing off the Chablis and fingering themselves to Dr. Oz reruns. You'd never guess she's had a years-long lady-boner for the standard ofay-cracka "musings," mostly variations on the classic theme of how come they can use that word, but we can't?

She's led a public existence for quite some time, doing years of social-media gardening -- carefully watering and fertilizing the ambulatory rutabagas who spend countless hours listening to closet cases like Melonhead Hannity and Fuckface Carlson regale them with lurid booga-booga tales of ISIS and MS-13 super-predator hybrids, menacing the elderly at the Piggly Wiggly in Bumfuck, Arkansas. You can't now suddenly immunize her from scrutiny.

Not that it matters -- let's face it, bigotry and vaxxism are job qualifications with their crowd. The only thing missing is a JPG on her hard drive of Obama photo-shopped as a loincloth-wearing spearchucker.

This asshole even glosses over Bill Shine's tenure as an unapologetic hatchet-man to a workplace rapist who not only got away with his crimes but was paid a fat $40M in the process from his agitprop nutwork. A decent society would have tarred and feathered a turd like Bill Shine years ago; instead, he's "rewarded" with a high-profile position in this ongoing shitshow, the treasonous embarrassment in DC.

Even without their dismal track records, anyone wanting to step onboard this sewage raft needs their fucking brain checked. But the idea that the Shines are just nice people done wrong is not just a flat-out lie, it should be completely intolerable for anyone to try float that shit past a competent editor.

Whatever puling standards "conservatives" once professed to have are clearly gone, like the brain cells of their sundowning clown-lord.

This Land Is Your Land

Is there really anything to say about school shootings anymore? Since everyone on both sides understands full well that nothing at all will ever be done about any of it, the whole thing has turned into a sad, repetitive kabuki.

Gun-control advocates will cite the usual litany of statistics and call for more background checks and mental health screenings, all well and good but completely useless in preventing a sick kid from taking daddy's legally-obtained gun. You want to make a dent in this thing, start figuring out a way to require liability insurance on firearms. We all have to have insurance to drive our automobiles (the other quintessentially 'murkin item, in that we are conditioned for life to self-actualize through our driving choices).

So it doesn't seem too onerous to propose that, say, if your son is caught outside the fucking White House with a bunch of weapons that are confiscated and handed back to you -- with an admonition not to give them back to your mentally-ill son -- and you give the weapons back to your son anyway, and he shoots up a Waffle House, well, not only are you a flaming dipshit, but you deserve to spend the rest of your miserable life making restitution to the families of those your son slaughtered. Any decent society would shun such an individual. He is morally responsible for the deaths of those people, even if, through some shameful quirks of the gun laws of his state, he isn't legally responsible.

I promise you, if we hold people financially responsible for the damage caused by their weapons, they'll be a lot more goddamned careful about locking them up and lending them out. But no one seems to be talking about that, not at the level you hear the other stuff anyway.

The gun-humpers, of course, are infinitely worse. Christ, are these people fucking tedious. You know what they're going to say before they say it. It's now just a perverse wager, the over-under on how many hours will elapse before:

• Someone will accuse the survivors of being "crisis actors" paid by George Soros, who apparently writes checks to strangers like most people draw breath.
• Someone will attempt to draw a tenuous political motivation (within minutes of the shooter being identified, someone literally started a Facebook page in his name, complete with photo-shopped pics of him wearing a Hillary cap and Antifa gear.
• Someone will show up at the school where kids were just murdered, the bodies not even cold yet, armed and stupid and ready to scribble some incoherent manifesto.

That last person is especially execrable, a piece of fucking shit. I am not exaggerating when I say that I hope he goes home, thinks about his choices and actions, maybe has one last cheeseburger and jerks a final wad into his favorite gym sock, and takes his sidearm and parks one in the bag of fevered worms that passes for his brain. Fuck that guy right in the medulla oblongata. He's a goddamned waste of oxygen, and there are already plenty of those in this world.

We've got some real decisions to make here, folks. Either you're tired of this shit, tired enough to vote for any sort of change at all to this country's bizarre mania for guns, or you're not. We can talk about NRA money or Koch money or whatever money goes to which candidate, but either people are sentient enough to pay attention and not be bought off by some stupid political ads, or they aren't.

And if they aren't aware enough to watch the ads and still understand what their rational self-interest really is, then we're done anyway. The body just hasn't fallen to the ground yet.

Rube Awakening

"One never knows how loyalty is born." -- Bert Cooper, Mad Men

Conor Lamb's recent victory in the PA-18 special election not only exposes very real fault lines in the crumbling Gooper claque, but also serves to bring some of the apostate rubes back home. Like all Cletus Safari articles, nothing more than anecdata can ever be churned by talking to a half-dozen people in a town whose name you've already forgotten by the end of the piece.

Still, the comments all point at the same thing:  they've grown tired of the shitshow, exhausted by the daily antics of ineptitude. The guy's a toxic asshole who can't get anything done. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is reflected in my own anecdata, talking recently with a couple of Clownstick-supporting friends who, while still supporting him, separately offered the exact same qualifier:  I wish he wouldn't tweet so much.

It's difficult to top that complete lack of awareness, and I said so, made sure to remind each of these people of that fact:  This is who he is, what he is. This is how he's always been. Lying about everything on his Twitter account is literally what got him into this. He's never not been a bullshitter. He lies about everything, no matter how small or inconsequential. Politics has nothing to do with it. He's a diseased soul.

Two things yesterday hammered those very points home.

• Using the legal system to harass stripper/porn star Stormy Daniels. Apparently there is a clause in the non-disclosure agreement that Daniels signed and David Dennison Fuckface Von Clownstick didn't, stipulating that each breach incurs a fine of $1M. Most sentient humans with at least some knowledge of the legal system agree that the amount is laughably unenforceable in an agreement that paid only $130K total in the first place, and wasn't signed by one of the agreeing parties.
• Firing Andrew McCabe, less than forty-eight hours before McCabe would have retired anyway. Whether or not McCabe gets some or all of his pension and benefits, the fact is that Clownstick sent his paid perjurer Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Thuhd to do the dirty work yesterday specifically to fuck McCabe out of what he had earned in his civil-service career.

This is the cruel, petty, vindictive side of Clownstick that again, fucking everyone warned the morons about. I know I call everyone I don't like an asshole, but this guy is a fucking asshole. If he had been born poor he would have been the neighborhood creep that spent his teens torturing stray cats, before moving on to hunting humans.

McCabe will land on his feet regardless; as one might assume (unless you're a doddering narcissistic moron), he kept notes of all their interactions, will probably see his inevitable book advance double or triple what it would have been otherwise, and is most assuredly on his way to Mueller's office Monday morning. He's not an idiot, and now he's been motivated by the world's worst boss.

Beyond the anecdotal down-punching, the immersion in the impotent god-emperor's temper tantrums and incoherent volatility, the fan club has to be seeing the catastrophic decisions affecting the bigger picture. He shitcanned Tex Drillerson while Drillerson was literally on the shitcan; he's pushing H.R. Haldeman Pufnstuf out the door, possibly for John Bolton, or some other swamp thing that'll make us wish for Bolton. Think of that:  by the time this abortion of an administration is eighteen months along, it will be on at least its third National Security Director, its second Secretary of State, probably its third FBI Director. And at least three other high-level positions are looking to be shuffled around, and possibly filled by dipshits from Fixed Noise.

And let's not forget who the dotard appointed as his economic advisor:  a cokehead with a history degree and a long track record of not knowing what the fuck he's talking about when it comes to the economy. The economy is actually doing relatively well [fake numbers!] for now, and two-thirds of the country still despises this motherfucker. But we're already overdue for a recession, and even the diehards might take some issue when Captain Eight-Ball fucks the dog and that extra twenty bucks in their paychecks goes away, along with the rest of their paychecks.

Then again, the economy won't much matter once we're tangled in North Korea, Syria, and Iran simultaneously, because Group Sex McPornstache wants to flex nuts for Cadet Bonespurs.

What struck me about the Pennsyltucky voters from the Times article was this common thread of "let's try something new," without bothering to even minimally vet that new something. Well, now they know, and at least some of them are willing to change their minds, and maybe even remember next time that stoves are hot, and that when someone tells you who they are, maybe you should believe them.

I think (though I'm not always certain) that I've come to accept that I will always be mystified by how otherwise intelligent, sensible people got gulled by this transparent snake-oil dipshit. I mean, we've all become accustomed to the screaming goobers with their Fuck Your Feelings t-shirts, barking slogans like trained seals at the Two Minutes of Hate rallies.

But there are some supporters (really!) who have good jobs and careers and skills and college degrees. They run their own businesses. Some of these folks are book smart and street smart, the kind of people who can hit a used-car lot and come out with a solid deal, not get rooked on the undercoating by Jerry Lundegaard.

And yet they fell for....this fucking clown, a serial failure who has to call the New York Post pretending to be someone else, to brag about how great he is in the sack, to shame his first wife and impress his mistress. These are people who care about "character" in their politicians, and they went for someone who, if nothing else, is entirely forthright about his completely amoral character and utter lack of business ethics.

This will never fail to baffle me. I feel like I'm missing some enormous financial opportunity, in not finding a way to scam them further. I get why they can't admit they fucked up, but how did they fall for it in the first place? It's like one of those internet-romance-finance scams, where some lonely divorcee sends a ricockulous amount of money to some guy with a nice photo and a smooth rap.

You read about these things and say, who are these fucking people? There's a similar pathology at play with the Clownstick dupes. They know they fucked up but can't admit it, even to themselves. So they keep doubling down and making excuses, until they run out of both.

At any rate, it seems to be finally starting to sink in with some of them, that he really is a barstool drunk -- inept, mouthy, right about every fucking thing even after being proven wrong every time. And he's an obnoxious asshole and a tiresome crybaby on top of all that.

It should speak volumes that they flooded the zone with Clownstick and his vile children, poured over $10M dollars into a race for a congressional district that won't even exist nine months from now. It should raise the antenna of Republican operatives and strategists that in Clownstick's me-me-me rally, illegally talking himself up for 2020 when he was supposed to be stumping for Rick Saccone, that neither he nor the teevee ads bothered talking about the tax cuts.

There's something in the air, and they can smell it, and they know it's not the smell of victory. We're about to see if the Democrats can actually learn something from all this.

The Government We Deserve

Because this is the country that made useless doorstops like the Kardashian sisters wealthy and famous, it is a virtual certainty that there's somebody out there -- hell, probably several million somebodies -- taking the idea of an Oprah Winfrey political candidacy seriously. It makes sense that the media dogs would chase their tails on this for a couple days, because as always, they have airspace to fill.

But the idea that a significant number of people would take such a thing seriously, or welcome it, is nothing more not less than a sign that those folks have given up -- on what a sane idea of a political system is and should encompass, on whether managing the world's largest economy and most powerful military force is a serious undertaking. Then again, letting Fuckface Von Clownstick run, much less win, is surely a sign of those things, but encouraging a billowy dilettante is just doubling down on all that.

That's not to say I wouldn't vote for her, if that was the choice. I would go out in my back field and dig up a river rock, and vote for that rock before I'd vote for Clownstick for any office. He'd fuck up dog-catcher. That should be abundantly clear by now.

I suppose there are many fine things about Oprah -- from all indications, she is generous and kind, and no doubt her charitable contributions and foundations hold up much better than Clownstick's little tax-evasion scams that barely make the effort of concealing their self-dealing and money-grubbing. And she is truly self-made. I find her incessant branding overweening and annoying, but there's no doubt that she came from poverty and bootstrapped herself into a position of real wealth and power, something Clownstick can claim but no one will ever believe (like every other claim he makes).

But Oprah is also responsible for inflicting on us Doctors Phil, Oz, and Jenny McCarthy. Someone who falls for this level of ongoing quackery has some issues. However, unlike Clownstick, she (and most normal human beings) at least understands what she is good at and not good at, and can delegate and let other people manage and have input over that latter category.

She's not going to run anyway, so no one out there should get too worried or get their hopes up too much. It's not going to happen. What almost certainly will happen is that Oprah will have a role in publicly vetting whatever roster of candidates eventually comes out of the Democrats' little shop of errors, and will pick on to put some money behind. Unlike these dopey vanity projects like Tom Steyer is running, Oprah understands that the money is better spent on candidates than petitions.

So if Kirsten Gillibrand is smart (and she is), she's already reaching out behind the scenes to Oprah, and getting on that train. Because the one thing Oprah has more of than money is cultural influence, one that transcends to some extent the weird class-race divide that's been stoked the last few years.

Endless Cycle

For as long as I can recall, the cycle plays out and repeats:  A Democratic president is elected. He is smart, earnest, wants to (at least appears to want to) help the little guy. He cleans up the mess left by his Republican predecessor, balances the budget, embraces the future, works collaboratively with the rest of the world.

Then a sufficient number of paint-chip-eating goobers augment their diet with daily inhalations of rubber cement, and vote for the most preposterous, transparent Republican dipshit they can find. Someone who exaggerates their worst impulses, who vocalizes their limbic tribal fears.

Frankly, I've spent the last few months learning to enjoy the ongoing clusterfuck. I want to see the goobers get everything they voted for, good and hard, even as I sincerely wish that the people who didn't vote for this bullshit had other options. But if the tax cut goes through, then everyone has a choice whether to observe the effects of it honestly, and a choice of whether to learn from it.

And as always, by "learn from it" I mean taking specific actions to counter those efforts and results. Protests and marches and phone calls are nice, but they only get you so far. Everyone is Washington is owned by some rich asshole or corporation, and if you hit them where it hurts, they'll listen. Protests don't cost 'em a dime, but boycotts hit them where they live.

Bob Corker just voted for a tax break for himself, after his usual tiresome mime show about what a "deficit hawk" he is. Let's call him for what he is:  a goddamned liar, and a particularly shameless one at that. But it's important to note where he will make that money, on his real estate investments. So, what are those real estate holdings, and can they be protested or boycotted? Hit that weaselly motherfucker square in his thieving gut. You might as well; you're paying for it regardless.

And the actual vote itself, the action you take at the ballot box. Show up. Take five minutes on election day and be there -- or better yet, take fifteen minutes and register to vote by mail, and bypass the lines and ID checks altogether. Trust me, it'll be the best move you ever made.

Just an example:  we heard for weeks non-stop about the apocalyptic consequences of the Alabama special election last week, yet at the end of the day, about 40% of eligible voters actually showed up. Turnout was down last year as well, when the choices could not have been any more stark. You know why angry old racist crackers keep winning and putting their retard candidates in office? Because they fucking well show up.

There's no shortcut or off switch on this thing, folks. Elections are not Super Bowls, where everyone takes some time off to relax after the time expires on the game. The game never ends, because the wealthy and the powerful never stop looking for ways to steal more money from poor people. Does that sound like work? Good, because it is work.

But it's also work to live a financial life of being permanently forced to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place, especially when it turns out, over and over again, that it's all so a bunch of spoiled white assholes can push a law (which none of them bothered to read) through that will give them all tax breaks, as well as allow hard-working aristobrats like Paris Hilton and the Walton heirs to keep more of the money they never lifted a finger to earn.

Never kid yourself about the cold, hard truth -- these pelf-grubbing assholes don't care about you, whether you live or die, succeed or fail, thrive or wither away. Your life, your family, your community are nothing to them. You are another species, you're livestock. It would be easy to say they hate you, but the fact is that hate would take some effort, and they don't want to expend any effort on the peons, beyond the absolute bare minimum.

What's always amazing is just how many members of the livestock class are more than happy -- eager -- to vote for the slaughterhouse and the butcher, every goddamned time. It's really something to watch. They even buy into the idea that a massive tax giveaway will actually result in lots of good jobs, as opposed to what tax giveaways always result in -- corporate bonuses and shareholder profits. We always joke about how Democrats are like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football, but the Dems got nothing on these fucking rubes, seeing everything through their fentanyl 'n' jebus goggles.

Whether that's the kind of country we want or not, it's the one we have now, and the symptoms and excesses continue to accelerate and accumulate. The falcon stopped listening to the falconer a long time ago. The flood is coming. Get a boat, grab onto something, learn to swim, or be swept away.

Choose Life

This. So much this.

 

Poisoning the Well

Once in a great while, it's fun and even illuminating to reread books. Depending on how long it's been, you can get a lot out of it. I first read Stephen King's Needful Things back in the early '90s, half a lifetime ago. It was billed more or less as a horror version of Our Town, and that was essentially how I recalled it, until actually sitting down and rereading it over the last week.

(We here in Northern Cali are in the midst of a protracted heat wave; the number of days below 100 degrees in the daytime is maybe five since Memorial Day, so more than enough time to read. I think I knocked out seven full-length books in July, somewhere around 3,500 pages. It's too fucking hot to do much else.)

As intrigued as I am by King's explanation in the link that Needful Things is in some respects a satire of '80s excess, I came away with more specific impressions this time around. If I were to condense this 700-page doorstop (not an insult; it's a richly rewarding and fun read, but it's a big-ass book) into a logline or elevator pitch for someone who for some reason hasn't gotten around to reading the book, it would go something like this:

The devil comes to a small New England town, and turns the townsfolk against each other.

That's a radical oversimplification, though it gets the broad points across. The devil (pun intended) is in the details, and contextualized against our current real-world backdrop, can be fleshed out more interestingly.

The main theme of the book is cupidity, the sort of slavering covetousness that spurs otherwise rational humans to abandon good sense in order to pursue an object that they connect perhaps too deeply with, for whatever reason. In NT, these objects are at once mundane and yet important on an intimate level -- a mint-condition Sandy Koufax card; Elvis Presley's sunglasses; a splinter of wood from Noah's Ark.

So maybe now the elevator pitch is a bit more expansive. The "devil" understands his target audience, their vacant desires and what they will do to attain them. He hooks them and sets them in motion against each other. Desire and surrender and our willingness to see what we want to see are central to the trickster demon's nefarious plans. And when the objects of desire turn out to be junk -- the ratty card of an unknown player; a busted pair of cheap sunglasses; a rotted hunk of lumber infested with bugs -- the marks (at least the ones that manage to eventually see the objects for what they actually are) are appalled at themselves, at what they did for an empty promise.

Any sort of deceptive person -- a used-car salesman, a cheating relationship, a grifter or con-man, a politician -- cannot do what they do effectively without the complicity of the mark. The old saw about a grifter being someone who gets you to empty your pockets, but a con-man being someone who gets you to empty you pockets and then go home or to the bank and get the rest of your money to hand over, holds true here.

A good liar understands the value of pride and the need for respect that we all have, the intrinsic need to not be thought a dummy or a rube. Pride becomes the hook for the con-man to reel in his fish -- the fish cannot admit that he was dumb enough to fall for a shiny rubber lure, even as the barb hangs out his cheek and he is being reeled toward the boat.

Leland Gaunt's goal in Needful Things is ostensibly to collect souls, but it is really just to make mischief, the sheer joy in turning neighbor violently against neighbor. The discord is the reward, you might say. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

In a consumerist society, we are used to our thoughts and desires being monetized. It is so routine at this point it barely merits notice. But what if those thoughts and desires are escalated, taken to the next logical level? Someone who figured out how to weaponize those things would wield unspeakable power. That is how cults are built, and whether that cult leader is Alex Jones or Kim Jong Un or Fuckface Von Clownstick is irrelevant -- the principles are the same, and they work on the same type of people.

Perhaps worst of all is that when it comes to deprogramming brainwashed cult victims, the consequences can be almost as bad as leaving them in the cult. It's not they're going to thank you and jump across to "your side." By definition they are in need of something, usually something that jibes with their preferences thus far -- so when that something gets removed, there's a good chance they'll find something worse.

The symptom gets treated, but the disease -- ignorance in the broader sense, but specifically things such as living in a bubble with their own facts, racism or racist assumptions, a daily addiction to outrage du jour stories (again, without bothering to check whether there's any factual basis to them or not) -- persists and mutates.

Obviously, the root causes go back generations, but the more recent origins do stem from persistent systemic inequality, that most Americans did not get to share in the "recovery" anywhere near to the extent that their betters (who, after all, caused the collapse in the first place) enjoyed. Until that gets adequately addressed, we are simply heading deeper into an extended cycle of viciousness, regardless of whether the con-man gets impeached and removed.

Second Amendment Remedies

It's been mostly op-ed sites and lowly bloggerses who have trucked in the phrase "civil war" so far, and if you'd asked me a month or three ago, I'd have scoffed at the notion. 'murkins are simply too fat, lazy, spoiled, complacent, etc. And when students of history, whether amateur readers or academic researchers, go back and chronicle the happenings of this or that war, they tend to need a catalyzing incident and/or person, in order to outline and centralize their thesis or book. The assassination of the archduke, that type of thing.

So it makes sense that the natural temptation for real-time corporate and citizen journos will be to portray James Hodgkinson as some sort of modern-day Gavrilo Princip, rather than as a fool with a violent history who espoused "progressive" sentiments and hopefully died knowing that he did far more harm than good to whatever it is he purported to care about.

This is how it always rolls -- when a "conservative" wingnut commits a heinous crime, it's always the work of a lone psychopath; when a professed "liberal" does something, it broad-brushes everyone who might fall remotely under that broad umbrella. As this generation's Iran-Contra hearing continues to distract everyone to its ultimate conclusion of futility (and maybe a lowly minion taking it in the ass for Dear Leader), while they sneak in a DOA turd of a health bill and try to gut Dodd-Frank under cover of darkness, this event will simply add more fuel to their bullshit, at least among themselves.

How soon they forget about Sarah Palin putting a couple dozen congress-critters in cross-hairs, and getting one of them shot (along with nine dead, including a little girl) in a supermarket parking lot. Not to mention how their current hero stoked the worst sentiments in the undercurrent of this country, empowered the worst sort of angry rube. It should not be too surprising that angry rubes on both sides might get worked up and motivated to action by this constant puke-funnel. A lot of people are pissed off about a lot of different issues, and the scary fact is that most of them at least have a point about something. And no one is actually doing anything about any of it.

Punch Drunk

I managed to stomach just a precious few minutes of tonight's circle jerk, but apparently I caught most of the highlights. Obviously, it's down to fuck-or-walk for Cruz and especially Rubio, in that they needed to learn to start cockpunching back if they were going to make any headway against Herr Drumpf.

We don't even need to wait for hindsight on this clusterfuck to see how consistently this "deep bench" managed to hand it over to Trump, over and over and over again. It begins with there simply being too many of them to begin with, preventing a consolidation of opposition. Plus they're all just fucking horrible; it's a sad state of affairs that of the five remaining candidates, as awful as Trump is, he may be the least awful of them.

Failed State

The term "failed state" or "hollow state" generally refers to a nation whose institutions do not or cannot govern anymore, due to collapse by a number of different means -- economic, resource depletion, natural catastrophe, war, internal strife, maniacal despot, etc. The wrong circumstances and the wrong people converge, and structures that were seemingly in place just a month or a year prior are suddenly no longer evident.

The same dynamic can happen to any sort of entity, of course, even (perhaps especially) a political party. So it is appearing more and more to be the case with the Republicans. Antonin Scalia's death over the weekend cast this into sharp relief, not just with McConnell's comically quick urge to show his entire hand when he had no need to, to the bizarre conspiracy theories suddenly surrounding Scalia's death.

No, whatever you do, don't consider the likelihood that a fat eighty-year-old man who kept his health concerns to himself, and whose enjoyment of wine and rich food was well-known, might have, you know, had a heart attack in his sleep. I know, try to contain your surprise. But the Michael Savage types out there pull the "that's what they want you to think, man!" card.

Kudos to Trump for falling for that one, by the way. Jesus, what a fuckin' maroon. He seems like he might just be dumb enough to, say, use junk bonds to fund an overpriced casino in a dying resort community, and have it go bankrupt in just three years.

Stop the Inanity

Company man Peter Wehner, in Commentary (hey, I was just there to jerk off to the pictures, not read the articles, m'kay?) finds himself on the horns of a dilemma, what with the bumptiousness of Trump and all, undermining Serious People Doing Very Important Work.

Citing not just the popularity of Corbyn but the rise of Donald Trump and avowed socialist Bernie Sanders in America, as well as unfolding events in Greece and France, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair argues, “There is a politics of parallel reality going on, in which reason is an irritation, evidence a distraction, emotional impact is king and the only thing that counts is feeling good about it all.”

He went on to say this:

The explanation for this parallel reality is something to do with people feeling empowered by their ability through it, to “fight back” against “the system”, the traditional ways of thinking about politics with all its compromises, hard decisions and gradual increments. It is the clarity of full-throated opposition versus the chin-stroking nuance of: “What would we do if we were in government?” It’s a revolution but within a hermetically sealed bubble…

Mr. Blair concluded this way:

Because it is a vast wave of feeling against the unfairness of globalisation, against elites, against the humdrum navigation of decision-making in an imperfect world, it persuades itself that it has a monopoly on authenticity. They’re “telling it like it is”, when, of course, they’re telling it like it isn’t.

Jesus H. Christ. Talk about a hermetically sealed bubble. Blair is firmly encased away from the consequences of his decisions, and the decisions of his friends, hard and otherwise. Corbyn's election, and the candidacy of Trump -- and yes, that of Bernie Sanders as well -- do in fact all share a common thread of frustration with the mendacious tendencies of "the system" Blair worked within. There is much talk about "hard decisions" and "compromises" but no talk at all about who bears the brunt of those things, every goddamned time.

You have to wonder sometimes if these assholes really and truly don't get it, or if they're just Oscar-caliber actors. If one of their hectomillionaire backers loses, say, 10% of their net value in a recession, well, it sucks, but fortunately they have many other tens of millions of dollars with which to cushion the blow. Not so for an average lower-middle-class (since the US hates the fucking middle class, and has driven it into the dirt) family, whose net worth is mostly tied up in the value of their home, which went underwater in the recession, and will take years to recoup its value, assuming he can hang on to it long enough.

Joe Hecto has cash flow, cash reserves, and an economy of scale to help him get back on his feet and recoup his losses quickly and reliably, while Joe Schmo has none of those things, and has to hope his job doesn't pull up stakes from under him and leave him destitute while he's trying to recover from the economic downturn -- the naturally foreseeable result of all those "compromises" Tony Blair described with such smug anguish.

Whatever policies Blair and his ilk -- and this includes the Clintons and the Bushes alike -- the outcomes are predictable: successes accrue to the elites, while failures fall on those least able to bear it. The rich do not send their kids to die or get maimed in some bullshit war, don't have to deal with a fracking company turning their water table into flammable chemicals, never have to worry about their job getting sent to Bangalore so some cocksucker can make one more million on top of the dozens or hundreds he already has.

If the risk-reward scenario were spread out more evenly, if Our Betters (bettors?) faced even remotely the same consequences for their own decisions that everyone else does, it would be a different story. But they never do, and it's not even close. And now Tony Blair has the fucking gall to come out of the woodwork and chastise the peons for their ingratitude. Look, asshole, I'm about the last person to defend a troglodyte like Donald Trump, or the ignorant mouth-breathers who support him. But it's almost impossible not to get why they're frustrated, and that they intuitively understand that the politicians are out to get them.

I don't know enough about Corbyn to comment one way or the other, but that's really the brass ring that just barely evades the Trump-lodytes. They are correct that the system is out to fuck them over; what they miss is that their boy is playing them like a fiddle as well. Like any good huckster, he's going to pull the rubes along until the critical moment, and then pull the rug out from under them.

What's tough to figure out here is what Trump's endgame is. He's almost certainly not as wealthy as he claims, but he is wealthy. And he's already taken some hits, between losing his deals with NBC and Univision. Unless he's got some mad scheme to compete with Shelly Adelson for some Macau casino real estate, where's the financial gain for him? Secondly, while Trump is not as smart as he thinks he is, he's not stupid, either; in fact, primarily because of his immense ego, he probably understands the ideals of rational self-interest more than most people. And he has to know that the odds of actually succeeding are against him; a snake-oil salesman knows better than anyone that the media is geared to a build-them-up-and-tear-them-down cycle, and that his time is coming.

Maybe his ego outweighs his better sense, who knows? Again, this is a guy who spends his time -- or at least pays someone to spend their time -- fucking around on Twitter, picking and responding to fights over the most mundane, idiotic things. You don't see Warren Buffett doing that, you don't see Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, any other billionaire, doing that stupid shit. Trump's a queer duck, no doubt. Good luck figuring out his master plan.

But whatever it is, the fact is that the rage he's channeled, however poorly, to whatever end, much of that rage is justified. Because these elites, these transnational merchant princes and their political dogsbodies, like Tony Blair, with no loyalty but to themselves and each other, have screwed them over royally. The plebes don't know much, and they don't know what exactly to do about it, but they know that much well enough. When they finally figure out the proper direction to focus their anger and frustration, it might be a good idea to look at property in The Okanagan or some such.

Hill of Beans

Look, I've never made any made any bones about it -- I do not like Hillary Clinton. More accurately, I don't like the idea of her becoming president. Even in a business populated solely by insincere people, her defining characteristic is a chilly, impenetrable insincerity.

That's not to say that "sincerity" is, in and of itself, an automatically virtuous trait. Ted Cruz appears to sincerely be an asshole. Bush the Lesser seemed sincere in his utter indifference to the world around him, in his desire to be a cowboy, and play dress-up when the occasion called for it. Sincerity is not the be-all/end-all of an inherently cynical game; it's not even a terribly important factor. But it does at least provide some sense of what a politician's actual positions are, beyond the rhetoric they spout.

I may not like what people like Cruz or Bush stand for, but I at least have an idea of what they stand for, and how they plan to go about achieving those objectives. I honestly don't see how Hillary Clinton's supporters can say the same thing about her. There's absolutely no reason not to assume that she will function exactly as Obama has, exactly as her husband did -- lots of happy hopey talk, lots of confrontational dudgeon about uncooperative Republicans, lots of futile tacking to the right to appease said gridlockers, not much to show for all that. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This doesn't hurt my feelings so much as make it virtually impossible to make even a semi-educated guess as to what she would actually do. Most likely a less personable, more hawkish version of her husband. But since the financial racket's just about exhausted its possibilities, she won't even be able to muster the appearance of prosperity Bill was able to, before NAFTA sucked all the jobs out and the economy became Rubinized, and he sold the working class' interests down the river by repealing Glass-Steagall, sending all productivity gains to the scumbags who already own everything. People recall the Clinton years fondly only because Fredo Arbusto was such a colossal fuck-up from the word go. And sure, compared the aforementioned shrub, Bill Clinton is Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Ron Jeremy rolled into one.

And that's really the sole appeal of Hillary Clinton -- the Republicans will run a group of scandalous morons who have about as much to do with responsible governance as truck nuts do with operating a motor vehicle. Whatever Clinton is, she's not an idiot, not a climate change or evolution denier. Pelf-grubbing corrupt triangulator with way too much baggage? Sure. But that also describes her likely opponent in the end.

(Seeing the name "George Herbert Walker IV" in the IBT article is a fresh reminder that the only people who have Roman numerals appended to their names are constitutional monarchs and assholes. Although, to be fair, the Bushes are essentially both of those things.)

The added benefit of holding one's nose and pulling the lever for the next Wall Street candidate is that it will annoy insufferable twits such as this. Though she does have a point -- a country so besotted with empty bullshit, a country that revels in truck nuts and rolling coal, really does deserve having to spend the foreseeable future having to choose between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

Another Bloody Election

On the one hand, it's easy to agree (however reluctantly) with The Pantload that the electoral process should and could be more than self-affirmation for celebrity airheads. On the other, one can be quite certain that Pantload is just fine with the usual salt-of-the-earth maroons cutting their own throats once again, because the Kenyan Moooslim is letting illegals with Ebola sneak across the Meskin border in order to distract from Benghazi.

But it was funny watching a bunch of chickenshit DINOs run like hell from their own party, and still lose. I'll give the teahadis their due -- at least they know what they fucking stand for, and by jebus stand for it. I'm still amazed that working people are dumb enough to vote for it, but it's not like halfwits such as Mark Pryor gave them much of an alternative. So this is what they wanted, and it's what they will get. Although I live in a blood-red county of the People's Republic of Cali, at least I don't live in some flyover dump that really takes the hit from the policies they just voted for.

Reap the whirlwind, assholes. You deserve nothing less.

[Update 11/7/14 6:30 PST:  This is one of the better analyses of the whole sordid thing that's I've seen.]

Bot World

I'm glad to see the estimable John Robb back on regularly at Global Guerrillas, as he frequently has that futuristic take on things. Case in point:  the steadily increasing presence of bots in the routine tasks that affect our lives and perceptions of the world. Most of us are probably aware to at least some extent of the proliferation of automated algorithms in financial trading, or article "spinners" used by internet marketers.

But it's becoming more and more prevalent; the notion that a bot could be used to spin a million Wikipedia articles is staggering. The idea that the same tech could be used to generate more conventional content -- books, magazines, movie scripts -- is annoying. That bots are doing most Wall Street trading should be a cause of concern. The possibility that bots may, sooner rather than later, be driving us around -- and that there may be insurance ramifications that necessitate having them drive us around -- should be alarming.

Even setting aside the sci-fi Skynet scenario of AI taking over, or the already problematic issue of near-constant government surveillance, think of how many jobs are lost just in the four proposed uses for bots (and of course there are and will be many more uses). In a groaning, increasingly overcrowded planet, with resource scarcity issues looming on all fronts, with any and every function automated, what exactly are all those unemployed people supposed to do?

Velikaya Voyna, Letom Akuly

So, now that some time has actually passed since Malaysia Flight 17 was shot down, by Russian-backed separatists using Russian-supplied weapons, have we actually learned anything new?

Putin is a bastard. Well, no shit. Good thing he got the Winter Olympics this year, and the 2018 World Cup. Sanctions are one way to hit this prick, another is to delegitimize his prestige goals. So we'll see how many of these outraged countries boycott the World Cup in 2018. But that's a pretty effective way to take the piss out of the guy.

Despite what armchair tough-guys Poor Ol' Straight Talk and Huckleberry Closetcase are braying every Sunday morning on the network circle-jerk, we aren't going to war with Russia. Here is where The Googul, or a history book, or even a decent memory, is helpful. Despite being in some sort of conflict or other since World War 2 ended, almost none of those military actions have been against countries that can actually fight back. Oh, your Iraqs and Vietnams and such like can muster enough guerrilla insurgency to wear us down and make us leave, but I'm talking about countries who can strike back in the US. That hasn't happened, and it ain't gonna happen.

Russia may be something of a Third World despotate (albeit an enormous one), in terms of laws and life expectancy and such, but they aren't in the same league as the banana stands and oil cans we're used to knocking over with our swinging dick.

What we're seeing in Ukraine is a civil war, pure and simple, and it's one that at least in part could have been avoided by more prudent action on the part of the US and Europe. Continuous instigation to get Ukraine into NATO and/or the EU, or to get them on the IMF debt hook, was always going to be unacceptable to Russia, just as Soviet incursions and overtures into (for starters) Cuba and Nicaragua were completely unacceptable to us. Do these people not recall the Saint Reagan years, or was it all just a collective coke-fueled dream?

"So what?", you might say, and not without some justification. "Fuck the Russkies, we run this popsicle stand, baby! USA! USA! Dee-fence, unh-unh! Dee-fence! We're the hegemon, we run the show, we call the shots."

Well, ah, yes and no. This is a classic case of "we got the guns, but they got the numbers"; yes, we have 11 aircraft carriers where no other nation has any, and we have state-of-the-art machinery in every phase of war -- land, sea, air. Hell, our killbot roboplanes are more sophisticated than all but a few conventional manned air forces.

But this has all come at a cost. Fat, drunk, and stupid, as Dean Wormer acidly observed so long ago, is no way to go through life, son. Militarists can jabber on about how the defense budget is at or near an all-time low as a percentage of GDP, but that is meaningless in the context of banana-republic levels of economic inequality and mobility. It is a zero-sum game; all those aircraft carriers and killbots come at the price of something else along the line -- a school, a road, a bridge, an educational grant, something to give someone in the lower dalit strata of 'murkin life an opportunity besides working multiple shit jobs just to survive, or worse yet, becoming a Juggalo.

In the meantime, they attempt to whip the maroons into a jingoist frenzy about Russia, or Syria, or whoever. Ambrose Beirce famously said that war was God's way of teaching Americans geography, but he would be disappointed to know that that is no longer even true, as in order to teach someone something the other party has to be willing to learn. And Americans just don't give a shit about where any of the multifarious objects of this or that week's Two Minutes of Hate are, or what the history or context might mean.

(Or that, uh, it ain't just Ukrusky separatists that shoot down passenger jets. There's your inconvenient truth, podna.)

The thing is, you're supposed to completely ignore the fact that the owners are screwing you over, every day in every way, that quite literally the more people they fuck over, the wealthier they get. Instead, you get bombarded with either a barrage of "the world is going up in flames" stories, again devoid of meaningful context or analysis, or completely meaningless features on the comings and going of "royals", or how some imperceptible change in yet another interchangeable comic-book movie franchise is, like, rilly rilly important.

When 1% of the people control more assets than the bottom 90%, it's a recipe for destabilizing levels of inequality. An increased level of anxiety and fear becomes systemic, and must be, via the corporate propaganda machine, projected onto The Other as much as possible. Whether it's assholes in a country you can't find on a map, or teeming hordes of Central American maras coming to steal your flat-screen teevees and virgin daughters, it's always someone else's fault. Pay no attention to the leveraged-buyout specialists behind the curtain.

Not to fear, though, gentle reader -- though your job has been outsourced to Bangalore, you will still be able to purchase the item you once manufactured for less money, so long as it doesn't exceed your gubmint assistance allowance. But hey, those Apaches are swell, aren't they?

The 1% needn't worry about any of this, mind you -- they can and have put millions of their countrymen out in the street without a care in the world, because increased capital mobility. And if there's one thing they know, it's that large groups of people will literally go live in tents before they'll mobilize and at least try to do something, anything about the fuckers that put them there.

And on the off chance we actually were to send any sort of ground force into Russia, or Ukraine, or anywhere else for that matter, there won't be any one-percenters' kids in the action. There is never any rich skin in this game.

Also, too.

Eat, Spray, Love

So apparently we are running out of ideas for useful, informative articles. Lest someone get the wrong idea, let's make something abundantly clear -- fist-fucking six dozen hot dogs down your gullet in ten minutes does not make you an athlete, it makes you something of an asshole. The fact that professional hockey took some years to get squared as to teams and rules does not equal the hard truth that "competitive eating" is more a joke than a real sport.

It's disgusting to compare the sheer gluttony of butt-chugging hot dogs to what Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan accomplished in their careers, even vicariously. Maybe it's because I was raised in a poor household where food was prepared to last 3-4 days at a time, but I am well conditioned to believe (secularly, anyway) that gluttony and waste are sins.

But as a sports fan as well, it's very difficult to reconcile the idiotic notion that trenchermen are "athletes" in the same sense that genetically blessed, superbly conditioned humans who do things that few other people can do, are athletes. Any asshole can chug water for a few weeks to extend their stomach, and allow themselves to gorge on dozens of hot dogs and tacos or whatever. That is not a skill, and athletics require some sort of skill. I am only mildly comforted by the thought that Joey Chestnut's dumps must be episodes of furious grunting and rectal brutality (much like Gary Busey's sex life).

I suppose complaining about nonsense like this is a lot like complaining about shitty music or hot weather -- like the poor, they will always be with us. But at least no one's trying to claim that Justin Bieber is Mozart, or that a 110° heat wave is actually a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

Scott Brown's Legacy

Longtime readers of this here cereal box know that a persistent (if intermittent) theme here, in between all the f-bombs and fat-cat rants, is the idea of possible pasts. Playing the "what if" game is useful as a strategic, speculative pursuit, as it forces us to think about alternative outcomes.

More specifically, it's the notion that fate sometimes turns on a dime, that a seemingly small event can have a catalytic "butterfly" effect on its surroundings. One such example is the death in 2009 of Senator Ted Kennedy, as his passing took place at a critical point in "negotiations" over what would eventually become the Affordable Care Act.

Somehow, the Democrats managed to lose the seat that Kennedy had held for nearly half a century, due to a spectacularly inept and tone-deaf campaign by Martha Coakley. Coakley lost the seat -- and with it, the Democratic supermajority in the Senate to one Scott Brown, a photogenic, amiable doofus that the Republicans seem to grow on trees. Brown proved to be the linchpin in what became the now-standard GOP practice of might be called ABWOW -- Anything But What Obama Wants.

Only in a turgid industry like politics would pure, stupid obstructionism for its own sake be considered a strategy, but that and the constant threat of filibustering is all that has kept the Republicans going since 2009. Brown filled the Senate seat just long enough to force Obama to accept a ham-fisted, loophole-riddled sack of shit whose primary purpose is to hold doors in place on windy days.

Had Kennedy lived even a year longer, chances are that the supermajority could have forced through the public option, the single-payer system that is the standard in every other industrialized nation. Sure, your betters in the corner offices might not get the nine-figure salaries they so richly deserve, but the last five years of impossibly wealthy corporations and owners whinging over every fucking dime would not have happened.

Let's accept as a given that regulatory legislation written primarily by the industry it's designed to regulate is guaranteed to either be useless or more harmful than the situation it's intended to remedy. This was seen as a feature, rather than a flaw, by Brown and his cohort. And now we have what we have, which is another layer of bureaucracy in the IRS, a health-care racket whose pricing structure is exactly as much of a theft mechanism as it ever was, a baroque clusterfuck of industries bloated with lobbyists and marketers, gouging their captive markets and laughing all the way to the bank.

So now this week, we have one of the more bizarre eructations resulting from the ACA. Some dipshit craft store has decided -- based on its own ignorant interpretation of how certain birth-control options actually work -- that it cannot, in good conscience, be party to the IUD holocaust, or whatever it is these overbreeding, Christofascist weirdos call it.

Legalistic and moralistic angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguments aside, what sucks about this is that it gives license for any and every business, whether for reasons of mere penny-pinching or for some fanciful interpretation of Bronze Age legends, some bullshit excuse to duck out of something that could and should have been very simple and easy. No, now because someone "believes" something that is empirically not true, they can weasel out of it. Yeah, that's gonna work.

The public option would have worked, and well, because it would have disintermediated all the parasitic middlemen who drive up costs with marketing, admin, and sales. Ask yourself how well your grandmother's cancer was abated by fucking admin.

None of this had to happen. And now Brown is running for Jeanne Shaheen's seat in neighboring New Hampshire, because there is always more damage to do, more precious money to be made. People will die, and other people will go broke, because the health-care system in this country is an abomination, something that should be strapped into an electric chair and fried like an egg.

But as long as Scott Brown and his benefactors continue to make money and make a flawed process even worse, I guess it's okey-doke. I mean, hell, Jeanne Shaheen is just an Obama puppet, and he's evil. Some 80-year-old fart in Nashua said so, so it must be true. Cool, pops, pay for your own fucking bypass, then. Frankly, I have no interest in subsidizing these morons. Talk about doing the impossible for the ungrateful.

Whenever the post-mortem on this country and this species is written, whether it's five or fifty or 500 years from now, the thing our successors will note about us will be exactly what we noted about the previous civilizations we've unearthed, thinking that we've surpassed them with our intellect, might, and technology. That thing is the tendency to be our own worst enemies, to undermine our own rational self-interest for the sake of superficial qualities of glad-handing and smiling contempt. Your mastery of Candy Crush on your smart phone does not make up for not seeing what is right in front of you.

When Mitt Romney smiles, I see nothing but discomfort -- the inner pain of a man who regards the unrich as another species, and does not understand why the customs of this society compel the best and brightest to break bread with such people, to pretend that they like or even comprehend them. For every rich guy with a conscience, there are a hundred Mitt Romneys -- and because they sincerely regard their infestation of the political process as a bulwark against takeover by the rabble, they're the ones that actually run the show.

As always, people who willingly vote for politicians who can barely conceal their contempt get exactly what they deserve.

Misdiagnosis

So now that Very Important People are showing how aware they are of this inequality thing, alarums have been raised, and remedies proposed. Here OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria throws some ideas into the ring for consideration:

Main remedies are activation policies, meaning get services in the governments that will get the people who are unemployed or seeking for employment with the job opportunities.

This is not being done enough. The United States spends one-fourth of what the rest of the OECD countries spend on this particular service, getting the unemployed or seeking employment with the employment opportunities.

Second, skills, education and skills. There’s a big mismatch between the skills and what the market is demanding. Therefore, your — you have people have diplomas, but they can’t do very much with it. Third, use a tax structure and use a budget in order to support companies that may be providing jobs or better opportunities.

And last but not least, remember, this is a problem that is affecting the capacity of the United States to get the people at the lowest revenue levels and at the lowest education levels to get up in the ladder, in the social ladder, in the ladder of opportunities.

Ah, the fabled "ladder of opportunities," esteemed tool of the privileged class who long ago pulled it up after using it. Look, Angel, chanting "jobs" and "education" like some oligarchist mantra means nothing at all when there are few jobs worth having anymore, far too many individuals chasing all of those jobs, and higher education is a fucking racket.

The implicit promise of the "jobs 'n' college" evangelists is that those things work hand-in-hand to improve the lives of individuals. And that's how it should work, certainly.

But the reality of it is that rather than a promise, it's more of a threat -- that if you don't go to college, and set yourself up for 10-15 years of indentured servitude in order to pay off the costs of said college, after which maybe you can start making real money, if there's enough jobs in your area, etc., etc., you're screwed.

These rackets serve not only to enrich the coffers of those who run them and profit from them, but they serve an ancillary purpose -- the masses of people who are herded into these rackets, and get on the financial hook, are instantly rendered compliant, complicit in the racket. They now have a vested interest to not be disruptive, to not ask too many questions -- or the wrong questions, such as why wages stagnated while productivity doubled, why the only people to profit during the so-called Great Recession were the already wealthy, why the "practical" thing to do with the one life you've been given is to be some indentured wage slave to some bastard who will fuck you over at the first opportunity, if it will make his stock portfolio go up a quarter of a point.

They don't want you asking questions, or protesting your ration of crumbs -- not that it matters; should you find the sack to get on your hind legs and say something out loud they'll just send Erin Burnett or some other water-carrier down to make fun of you, marginalize you before your plaint even gets a fair hearing.

They would prefer that you either go along to get along, or just say "fuck it" and give up your eternal tilt at an indifferent windmill. I don't think it can be overstated, how little the elites give a red-hot monkey-fuck about you, your families, your communities, your country. Make no mistake, as far as they're concerned, you're either a tool for them to use, or an impediment to their efforts. That is the extent of what you are to the people who actually run this country, run the world.

Serious People jabber about this condition of persistent, escalating inequality, make modest proposals, hem and haw as if this is some trick of the tail, a logistical impossibility to correct. Folks, it is almost heartbreakingly simple, and it does not have to involve tumbrels and guillotines (though you'll get no argument from me should it go in that direction).

The mechanics of a capitalist society, to the extent that we still live in a truly capitalist society, are premised on carrots and sticks, incentives and disincentives. Ideally (heh), the carrots and sticks should be applied as needed, regardless of the situation. From a purely systems analysis perspective, it's not supposed to be a question of who applies those carrots and sticks, so much as what applies them. In systems dynamics, they are applied to optimize the overall efficiency of the system.

In the post-World War 2 era, it worked that way for a few decades. Americans of that time realized that an empowered working class spent its money on goods and services, thus enriching the companies who produced those things. Rich people paid taxes, and paid their workers a wage they could live on and spend money on. It was tacitly understood by all that incentives and disincentives would be applied by the system to keep the machine humming.

But as you may have noticed, it no longer works that way. Rich people and corporations get carrots, everyone else gets sticks. There is nothing resembling even application. This is because the system is no longer run and maintained by systems people, relatively non- or bi-partisan people who understand the utilitarian notion of the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

In deregulating the finance and lobbying industries, Saint Reagan essentially sold the system to the elite money class, who of course simply run it for their own benefit -- and everyone else's detriment. It is not enough for them to gain, everyone else must lose in the process. Saint Clinton continued this new dynamic and globalized it, put the final nail in the coffin with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Bush the Lesser drove the cock home with the jackhammer fury of a thousand Ron Jeremys, Obama has done jack shit to remove said cock, and if you think either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush will ever consider not doing whatever Wall Street tells them to, you should really stop huffing industrial solvents.

On and on it goes. It will continue, probably worsen for most. It will not change, no matter how much you wish, no matter how fervently you participate in the useless voting ritual. It is true that only one party wants to get rid of the EPA, Department of Education, the minimum wage, a woman's right to choose, and so on. But it is also true that neither party will ever stand up to the people who have perpetrated this economic monstrosity that pervades everything else, not even a little bit.

I feel like a broken record most times anymore, bringing up this topic. Not because I'm bored with it -- far from it. I'm utterly fascinated by this tiny claque of transnational merchant princes, who actively -- deliberately, mind you -- are on an open mission to fuck this country over, and everyone in it. I'm fascinated by people who have more money than they could ever spend, and yet it's still not enough for them. I'm amazed by people who look at the millions of lives they adversely affect as some big fucking game.

I'm fascinated by the poor people that these soulless fuckers rook into voting against themselves, an enormous swath of chickens who can't wait to enthusiastically show their support for good ol' Colonel Sanders. How could you not find these people interesting. how could anyone not watch this dynamic and be compelled by its narrative, by its inevitable outcomes?

And people like Angel Gurria fascinate me perhaps most of all, because Gurria probably thinks he means well. These dogsbodies of the merchant princes, they should know better -- I mean, they do know how to read fucking spreadsheets and charts, right? But they seem sincere in their convictions that if "we" just made "opportunities" available for "them" to bootstrap themselves, the problem would solve itself. No matter how much evidence over the last generation is available and observable, they faithfully hew to their standard "remedies" -- go through the "higher education" racket, get balls-deep in debt so you can get a better job (doing what?), spend most of your working life trying to repay that debt and not get your job shipped to Asia. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

So I mentioned that this situation is simpler to resolve than the Serious People make it out to be, and it is. But there has to be willingness to use carrots and sticks on everyone, not just carrots for the owners and sticks for the peons. Incentivize keeping companies stateside and not exporting labor. Incentivize paying a living wage. Disincentivize screwing your workers, the way shitheel companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald's have become accustomed to doing. Make corporations pay their fucking taxes. Disincentivize offshoring profits. Disincentivize overcharging for college education. Start a massive infrastructure work project, like Eisenhower did with the interstate highways. Enact a 1-2% redistributive tax on the "high net worth" assholes, say, anyone with over $10M in wealth. Spread it around. Institute a one-time debt jubilee, paying down either a certain percentage or amount of interest-bearing debt on people's homes and educations (which are usury and overcharging in the first place). The Masters might be surprised at how quickly the economy surges from such measures, and everyone, including the owners, would actually profit from these measures. After all, if the peons have more money, they will buy more stuff. Shocking, I know.

Obviously none of this will ever happen, but what's really pathetic and disheartening is that no one with access to the corporate media would even consider mentioning such things. If there's a system that's incredibly self-regulating, it is the system that manufactures "official" opinion and consent. And the pillaging of the rentier class will persist for exactly as long as the peons are willing to put up with it.

Takin' Care of Business

Never were we told, we'd be bought and sold, when we were innocent. -- Fuel, Innocent

I missed this missive from Brother Orlov a couple weeks ago, but it is spot-on, as any casual observer should be able to tell. At least at the national level, your vote, even if it's not suppressed, even if it's "for" someone rather than merely "against" an opponent, is a waste, a piss in the wind, something to be ignored en masse.

This should be laid out in simple terms of procession, as often as possible:  The political system is owned and operated by a very small group of very wealthy individuals and corporations. This same oligarchical class also --coincidentally, mind you -- happens to own all of the major canals of disseminating points of information and discussion, not just the networks who provide content, but the physical modes by which said content is transported. To the extent that this class appears to tolerate any meaningful form of dissent or reform, it is almost entirely illusional.

Consider the rise and flail of one Barack Hussein Obama, who was seen at his first investiture in 2008 as a genuinely transformational figure, someone who not only could but desired to engage in systemic reform, and could communicate this on an intellectually honest level. Welp, how has that all turned out? You can -- and should -- defend Obama to a great extent by reiterating the blatant, shameless obstructionism of the teahadis in the House, but you must also accept that Obama has too often been diffident and passive in the face of their idiocy and hostility.

I said it when it happened, and I'll say it again -- there are two things that happened very early on after Obama's first election that he could and should have straightened out. The first incident occurred at the '08 Republican National Convention, where Joe Lieberman ratfucked Obama (and yes, you whinging assholes who are still crying about Ralph Nader, I want you to consider what sort of vice-president this shameless cocksucker would have been). The first thing Obama should have done after winning that election was wall-slam the esteemed senior fuckface from Connecticut and explain to him in no uncertain terms how shit was going to roll from here on out. Instead, he fucking hugged him. Shit, why don't you knit him a fucking sweater while you're at it, wash his car or something? Jesus H. Christ.

The second major opportunity missed was when Obama held a (giggle) health care address in September of 2009, and pigfucker Addison Graves "Call me Joe, because that's a man's name" Wilson decided to impress his colleagues by heckling Obama, shouting "You lie!" not once, but twice during the speech. Now, someone who's serious about not being pushed around by bidness-as-usual assholes would be on the phone to their party chairman the next day, and instruct them to spend $50m in the next election to push that motherless fuck out, if that's what it took. They gave it a token shot in 2010, but didn't even bother to run an opponent against Wilson in 2012. Balls to the wall, amirite?

You might (rightly) say, "Well, jeez, Heywood, what can ya do? We have to reach across the aisle, forge a consensus, politics is the art of the possible, blahbedy-blah-blah." Fair enough, and believe it or not, I agree with the principle of that. But I also recognize when a bully is trying to test defenses and pushbacks, and the only way, unfortunately, to beat such people back is to go full fucking apeshit on them. Before Obama had been in office for a full year, the Republicans understood that he was willing to take shit from them, and that bolstered their resolve to thumb their dicks and obstruct everything he proposed.

So when the honest post-mortem on this administration gets written, if it ever gets written, it will have to state at or near the top that one, Obama failed to accomplish much of what he said he'd do and set out to do; and two, that this was primarily because of an inability to assert himself convincingly with his opponents -- in short, people who laugh at you will never work with you or concede to you. On anything.

These days, I have two recurring dreams, desires, whatever you want to call them. One is some sort of rich-uncle windfall coming in, and I cash out and move to Costa Rica or Croatia or somewhere, and see what life is like outside the toxic circle. The second, more contemporaneous of these idealized visions is a scenario where "we" the "people" are presented by our corporate insect overlords with a "choice" between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. And we say "fuck you very much," and act and react accordingly. We stop pretending, we stop legitimizing this bullshit, we stop hoping that someone, anyone upstairs gives a red-hot monkey-fuck about anyone besides themselves, we stop waiting for crumbs from the table that never seem to come.

I mean, neither of those things will ever happen, but one has to hold out some sense of hope.