Workie-workie!

Greetings good citizen,

Today’s topic is the world of work. While some, er, ‘freethinkers’ argue that work is unnecessary, they can’t argue their way around that fact that if nobody works, nothing gets done.

And you’d be amazed at how few people want to participate in ‘productive ventures’ (at least on a ‘trade basis’.)

They’d rather ‘decorate’ rocks and trade those for food than do the actual hard work of tilling the soil and growing crops or tending to the needs of the livestock because if someone doesn’t do either, there won’t BE any.

But our ‘why workers’ point to nature shows like ‘Yukon men’ or ‘Alaska the last frontier’ and their ‘self-sufficient’ lifestyle and claim that’s how it should be.

When the shows themselves focus on how as the population rises, it becomes harder and harder to bag enough game to make it through the 8 month long winters.

Yet each episode demonstrates how Mother Nature herself is a cruel taskmaster. You’ve only got so much time to get the job done and if you don’t finish or if things are a little ahead of schedule, too bad.

Which is to say every one of our ‘frontiersmen’ works their ass off just to survive.

Mind you, nobody ‘pays’ them to do what they do. (Well, the TV crew must pay ‘em something but there isn’t anyplace up there to buy the stuff you need.) So the money buys fuel, ammo and tools like ATV’s, new boats and bigger guns.

Most of us grew up in a society that doesn’t make us work ‘hard’ (Compared to what our ancestors had to do to survive.)

The miracle that is ‘money’ enables us to live comfortably without having to do EVERY LITTLE THING for ourselves.

So it is that we have encountered a different, er, ‘situation’ than the one our ancestors faced…although, truth be told, this situation is far from ‘new’.

Now we have more workers than work…what a happy situation because now everyone can do a smaller chunk of the task at hand and everybody wins more ‘free time’.

But that’s not how it works under (more for me) capitalism.

Worse, more for me capitalism is extremely wasteful…now that the population is approaching the ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet, don’t you think it’s time we start addressing the inefficiencies and inequities of the ‘more for me’ mindset?

Yes, ‘need’ drives the entire picture…and it’s what keeps the ‘more for me’ crowd living in the lap of luxury.

How, er, ‘frightening’ is it that the already filthy rich don’t need but a fraction of the wealth they have gouged out of the rest of us?

It SHOULD scare you spitless.

Because if money were being used ‘correctly’ the more for me bunch wouldn’t have the lock they have on our species survival they have now.

The very fact that the uber wealthy exist demonstrates the main flaw in capitalism.

Sadder perhaps is the >One Percent’s ‘legalization’ of their unjustified avarice.

When the giants of our society had the Supreme court (which they own, lock stock and barrel!) declare that the purpose of commerce was to enrich its owners!

Whereas the original and most commonly accepted definition of the purpose of commerce is to serve society’s needs ‘at a reasonable profit’.

How much trouble do you think ‘we’ (as a species) are in considering the conservo-whackos did away with the anti usury laws? (Never mind stripping you of your right to due process!)

Um, boys and girls, the >One Percent have declared ‘open season’ on us and there isn’t a darn thing we can do about it! (I was going to say they declared war upon us but that would imply we have the ability to fight back…which we don’t!)

The real riddle is what these weasels are going to tell our sons and daughters when they order them to open fire on us?

Now here’ s a scary thought. Considering the basic theme of most video games, how many of ‘em will even hesitate?

We aren’t ‘The Family of Man’. We are a collection of (pseudo) ‘rugged individuals’ a la John Wayne or Captain Kirk.

And guess who has fed our children THAT particular illusion?

While we did nothing to stop them.

Which is to point out good citizen that there are some real ‘monsters’ loose at the top of our society.

And they should be made to PAY for their CRIMES.

Illegal and immoral are two separate concepts and you can only wonder why…because immoral SHOULD BE illegal. Yet these sicko’s are going to use the ‘I’ve done nothing illegal’ defense as they stand amidst the smoking landscape that their actions turned to scorched earth.

Then, the real coup de grace, they’re going to ‘apologize’.

And we will respond with ‘take a hike mac!’

So let’s recap, shall we?

We have a world that we have ‘tamed’ and COULD BE working a lot less than we currently do…but we have been saddled with a system of commerce that doesn’t need all of the available workers.

Now the, er, ‘beneficiaries’ of this twisted system are trying to keep things from changing, which HAS RESULTED in the collapse of the commerce system.

(In case it looks like I went screaming off the reservation towards the end there…I did not.)

The question, good citizen, as always, is ‘what are we going to do about it?’

Anyway,

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Me First!

Greetings good citizen,

This morning’s news caused me to do a double take because it is that incredible, like we need more ‘evidence’ of which letter SHOULD come after the incumbent’s name…

WASHINGTON — When President Obama nominates Chuck Hagel, the maverick Republican and former senator from Nebraska, to be his next secretary of defense, he will be turning to a trusted ally whose willingness to defy party loyalty and conventional wisdom won his admiration both in the Senate and on a 2008 tour of war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The choice of Mr. Hagel, the first Vietnam veteran to be nominated for the post, would add a prominent Republican to Mr. Obama’s cabinet, providing some political cover for the president’s plans to exit Afghanistan and make cuts to a military budget that has roughly doubled since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

But Republicans made clear on Sunday that they would give Mr. Hagel a rough ride on his path to the Pentagon, questioning his support for Israel, his seriousness about the Iranian nuclear threat and his commitment to an adequate defense budget. And Mr. Obama may also face difficulties from some Democrats who are wary of negative comments that Mr. Hagel made more than a decade ago about gays.

Quick point before we smack ourselves silly with disbelief would be, you don’t suppose the corporate owned media HAD TO throw in that BS about Mr. Hagel’s past ‘anti-gay’ comments, do you…I mean who gives a fuck?

The infamous ‘they’ handed the election to Obama because appointing their boy Mitt would have created too much backlash. You’d have had open revolt in the streets.

While I am tempted to shout ‘see, he really is a DINO!’ I had ‘forewarned’ that this day was coming.

And it doesn’t satisfy me in the slightest to be both correct and to have NOT voted for the lapdog. (At least the girls got arrested for protesting their exclusion from the presidential debates!)

Naturally the curious part will be seeing the ‘rubber stamp’ in action as the One Percent’s will is fulfilled, as commanded.

Sort of redefines the term, ‘so let it be written, so let it be done.’

Never mind all of the ‘criminals’ who have skated for the past (3)5 (yeah, that’s thirty-five!) years (probably longer.) I am sure I’m not the only one who finds this ‘homogenous’ government (that acts in lockstep) disturbing.

Barking like rabid dogs until something the One percent favors comes along then it is rubber stamped without even the pretense of debate and it back to being ‘mortal enemies' again!

Are we ‘over the edge’ good citizen? Is it the corporate owned media’s intention to infer that we are all insane because we refuse to acknowledge the inconsistencies (that they routinely gloss over…)

More disturbingly is the ‘revolving door’ of the ‘usual suspects’ being awarded cabinet posts by members of the opposite party.

Does party affiliation mean ANYTHING anymore? (Or are those piddling trifles only of concern to the ‘riff-raff’ and the rabble?)

Worse, we’re being told the same thing we are getting mighty sick of hearing…and that is ‘What are YOU going to do about it?

And we all know the answer to that one, don’t we?

Nothin’.

The criminals are in charge and there isn’t a thing we can do about the mismanagement of our civilization...and you'd think by now somebody would have come up with a solution to that problem.

And we have…it's just not one the criminals ‘like’…but since when are the criminals supposed to be ‘okay’ with justice?

Isn’t it their reckless disregard for the common good that marks them as criminals in the first place?

They know this and try (uselessly) to move the ‘goalposts’ of justice further down the field…by inventing improbable scenarios…like the GWOT.

It takes a truly sick mind to invent something so nebulous…and now we have our national leaders appointing said fabricators to top cabinet posts!

FULL STOP

WE ARE FACING A CRISIS OF CIVILIZATION ENDING IMPORTANCE

But it’s being handled dead wrong!

I will once again point out that MONEY does not equal INTELLIGENCE.

Although it is a sad indictment of our society to feel compelled to point that out because too many people make that erroneous connection.

(Jack Ass is rich so Jack Ass must be smart!)

The ‘criminals’ are protecting their ‘privileges’ at our expense.

It is time we jail the criminals and their co-conspirators in the legal and financial communities.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Seriously?

Greetings good citizen,

Sunday night and I’m just getting around to posting…because it snowed, then it rained and then is snowed again…and then the whole shebang froze, making for a miserable clean up.

But my frostbitten backside really gets burning when the ‘disarm-niks’ sit on their high horse, claiming mass murder ‘doesn’t happen’ in cultures that have banned guns.

Naturally these assholes ignore the bombings that replaced the gun attacks.

And if the One Percent decided they wanted us, er, ‘defenseless’ we wouldn’t be talking about their ‘right’ to instruct their lapdogs to collect all of the registered guns, we’d be talking about how long it would take for them to criminalize the ‘unexplained loss’ of a weapon.

Because that’s what ‘bans’ do, they create criminals.

Let’s see what zipperhead has to offer regarding the ‘impossibility’ of tougher weapons legislation as we wonder what side of the political fence ‘Fair Vote’ rides on… Aren’t the Republicans overly concerned with ‘stolen elections’?

Why America Can't Pass Gun Control
Hint: It's not the NRA or a gun-loving culture.
December 24, 2012 |

This article originally appeared at The Atlantic.

The horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn., is the latest grisly episode in what has become a muted debate in the United States: what to do about gun violence and well-armed mass murderers. But we will make a prediction: Even in the face of this national tragedy, President Obama will have little success enacting substantive gun control.

Here's why: Obama can read the political map as well as anyone, and he knows that, just as in the past after previous brutal tragedies, the politics of gun control rest on complicated terrain. Many gun control advocates blame the lack of policy action on America's gun-loving culture and the influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA), but that's too simplistic. Already in the wake of the Newtown carnage we have seen aslew of pundits drawing the wrong conclusions, just as they have after previous tragedies.

Sure, Americans like their guns more than other nations, but polls often have shown majority of Americans wanting more gun control, with two-thirds calling for more regulation following the Columbine massacre in 1999. But the political system - including the Democratic Party -- has failed to respond. And it's not because Democrats and Obama are afraid of the NRA's deep pockets, as so many pundits are wrongly concluding. Quite the contrary, the NRA has money because it is powerful, not the other way around. And the NRA is powerful because it is clever at working the clunky architecture of our political system, which gives immense clout to a tiny slice of swing voters in a handful of congressional districts. [snip]

[About the author:]

Steven Hill (www.Steven-Hill.com) is a political writer, cofounder of FairVote and former director of the political reform program at the New America Foundation. Besides Alternet, his articles have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Nation, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Ms., Sierra, American Prospect, Truthdig and many others, and he has quoted and interviewed by media around the world, including the BBC, Democracy Now, C-Span, Fox News, Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, Sirius and many others.

Robert Richie is the executive director of FairVote.

At the end of the day this has NOTHING to do with guns. The shooters in every case didn’t do what they did BECAUSE ‘they could get their hands on guns!’

They did what they did because they had a problem with how they were being treated and saw no other way draw attention to the matter.

EVENTUALLY (because it almost happened this last time…until buttheads like Steve Hill turned up, pointing in the wrong direction, as usual.)

And what almost happened this time? We ALMOST acknowledged that the common thread between the massacres and that was the desperation a sense of nothing left to lose by the perpetrators.

Adam Lanska went into that school knowing ahead of time he was going to blow himself away, making him no different than a suicide bomber.

And, as usual, these ‘desperadoes’ are dismissed as ‘loner lunatics’. Isolated cases that won’t happen again…until next time.

How bad does it have to get good citizen, we are barely making it a month without some new incident of somebody ‘going postal’ because they’ve had enough (of being treated like they are human debris.)

Yeah, it’s pretty sick to be using this type of social backwash to hype my own agenda but don’t you think it’s beyond time for a change?

And I mean real change and not Obamaesque ‘lip service’.

It is only a matter of time before you (or worse, someone you love) becomes capitalism’s ‘collateral damage’.

When a ticking timebomb set off by a capitalist socio-path blows your world away, what are YOU going to go after, the tool the perp used OR THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM?

Make no mistake about it good citizen, the longer they ignore this the worse it has become…

And just think this is the DAY BEFORE New Years Eve!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wishes!

Greetings good citizen,

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder, they (naturally) surprise the fuck out of you by becoming downright surreal!

The logic of Schuller’s philosophy, which is the doctrine of positive thinking at its most distilled, isn’t exactly complex: decide to think happy and successful thoughts — banish the spectres of sadness and failure — and happiness and success will follow. It could be argued that not every speaker listed in the glossy brochure for today’s seminar provides uncontroversial evidence in support of this outlook: the keynote speech is to be delivered, in a few hours’ time, by George W . Bush, a president far from universally viewed as successful. But if you voiced this objection to Dr. Schuller, he would probably dismiss it as “negativity thinking.” To criticize the power of positivity is to demonstrate that you haven’t really grasped it at all. If you had, you would stop grumbling about such things, and indeed about anything else. [snip]

In reality, mine is up in the nosebleed section; it is a hard plastic perch, painful on the buttocks. But I am grateful for it, because it means that by chance I’m seated next to a man who, as far as I can make out, is one of the few cynics in the arena — an amiable, large-limbed park ranger named Jim, who sporadically leaps to his feet to shout I’m so motivated!” in tones laden with sarcasm.

He explains that he was required to attend by his employer, the United States National Park Service, though when I ask why that organization might wish its rangers to use paid work time in this fashion, he cheerily concedes that he has “no fucking clue.” Dr. Schuller’s sermon, meanwhile, is gathering pace. “When I was a child, it was impossible for a man ever to walk on the moon, impossible to cut out a human heart and put it in another man’s chest … the word ‘impossible’ has proven to be a very stupid word!” He does not spend much time marshaling further evidence for his assertion that failure is optional: it’s clear that Schuller, the author of “Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking” and “Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do!,” vastly prefers inspiration to argument. But in any case, he is really only a warm-up man for the day’s main speakers, and within fifteen minutes he is striding away, to adulation and fireworks, fists clenched victoriously up at the audience, the picture of positive-thinking success.

The organisers of Get Motivated! describe it as a motivational seminar, but that phrase — with its suggestion of minor-league life coaches giving speeches in dingy hotel ballrooms — hardly captures the scale and grandiosity of the thing. Staged roughly once a month, in cities across North America, it sits at the summit of the global industry of positive thinking, and boasts an impressive roster of celebrity speakers: Mikhail Gorbachev and Rudy Giuliani are among the regulars, as are General Colin Powell and, somewhat incongruously, William Shatner. Should it ever occur to you that a formerly prominent figure in world politics (or William Shatner) has been keeping an inexplicably low profile in recent months, there’s a good chance you’ll find him or her at Get Motivated!, preaching the gospel of optimism.

As befits such celebrity, there’s nothing dingy about the staging, either, which features banks of swooping spotlights, sound systems pumping out rock anthems, and expensive pyrotechnics; each speaker is welcomed to the stage amid showers of sparks and puffs of smoke. These special effects help propel the audience to ever higher altitudes of excitement, though it also doesn’t hurt that for many of them, a trip to Get Motivated! means an extra day off work: many employers classify it as job training. Even the United States military, where “training” usually means something more rigorous, endorses this view; in San Antonio, scores of the stadium’s seats are occupied by uniformed soldiers from the local Army base.

Technically, I am here undercover. Tamara Lowe, the self-described “world’s No. 1 female motivational speaker,” who along with her husband runs the company behind Get Motivated!, has been accused of denying access to reporters, a tribe notoriously prone to negativity thinking. Lowe denies the charge, but out of caution, I’ve been describing myself as a “self-employed businessman” — a tactic, I’m realizing too late, that only makes me sound shifty. I needn’t have bothered with subterfuge anyway, it turns out, since I’m much too far away from the stage for the security staff to be able to see me scribbling in my notebook. My seat is described on my ticket as “premier seating,” but this turns out to be another case of positivity run amok: at Get Motivated!, there is only “premier seating,” “executive seating,” and “VIP seating.”

It is only months later, back at my home in New York, reading the headlines over morning coffee, that I learn the news that the largest church in the United States constructed entirely from glass has filed for bankruptcy, a word Dr. Schuller had apparently neglected to eliminate from his vocabulary.

Um, not for nothing but you don’t suppose it’s a coincidence that the list of sponsors of this whole ‘voodoo prosperity’ gimmick reads like the Who’s who of the conservo-whacko movement?

We knew these people were ‘gone’ but until now we weren’t certain just how far the ‘Kool-Aide’ went…

Well, this article wraps things up nicely!

And to be honest, good citizen, I didn’t read any further.

I don’t need anybody to define ‘success’ for me (nor do I attempt to define it for others, a decidedly Republican pass time.)

I think the most disturbing ‘revelation’ this article makes is the extent of the US government's’ ‘support' for these carnival barkers.

It’s the story line of the >One Percent they are actively defending…why should tax dollars be expended to spread useless propaganda (while the conservo-whackos are howling about the deficit and ‘entitlement’ spending.)

Which brings us full circle with that pesky ‘management problem’ I keep bitching about.

Did I mention our civilization is woefully ‘mis-managed’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Wicked...

Greetings good citizen,

Again it is curious to note that the (Madly inflated) Dow has dropped 600 points since this time last week and apparently this is NOT NOTEWORTHY!

Um, since the only noticeable useful information to be provided by the stock markets are as a gauge of the One Percent’s feelings regarding global affairs in general, perhaps they are supposed to be ‘sulking’ over the loss of their ‘alternate’ candidate.

An unhappiness that will certainly be as shortlived as it is undeserved.

How unfortunate is it for the rest of the public that the media plays us for stupid regarding the One Percent’s ‘relationship’ with the world’s largest purchasing organization (who regularly pays through the nose for literally EVERYTHING! )

Nation Building: Public Talk, Secret Action
In the final days of the presidential campaign, President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that it was time to reap a peace dividend as America’s wars wind down.  Nation-building here at home should, he insisted, be put on the agenda: “What we can now do is free up some resources, to, for example, put Americans back to work, especially our veterans, rebuilding our roads, our bridges.”

Setting aside just how slipshod or even downright disastrous Washington’s last decade of nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan have been, the president’s proposal to rebuild roads, upgrade bridges, and retrofit the country’s electrical grid sounds eminently sensible.  After all, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives America’s infrastructure a grade of “D.”  If, in the era of the $800 billion stimulus package, $1 billion at first sounds paltry, ask the mayors of #Detroit, Belmar, New Jersey, or even New York City what that money would mean to their municipalities.  America may need $2.2 trillion in repairs and maintenance according to ASCE, but $1 billion could radically change the fortunes of many a city.

Instead, that money is flowing into the oil-rich Middle East.  Unknown to most Americans, thousands of State Department personnel, military advisors, and hired contractors remain at several large civilian bases in Iraq where nation-building projects are ongoing; hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been flowing into military construction projects in repressive Persian Gulf states like Bahrain and Qatar; and the Pentagon is expanding its construction program in Central Asia.  All of this adds up to a multifaceted project that seems at odds with the president’s rhetoric.  (The White House did not respond to TomDispatch’s repeated requests for comment.)

Just as the, er, ‘progressive media’ has predicted, the Republicans, supporters of tax cuts for the uber wealthy, are also HUGE ‘patriots’ in their support of military spending.

This wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t distort the economy beyond recognition…but that’s one of the ‘side effects’ of predatory capitalism (over-concentration of money at the top of the social ladder, leaving wretched poverty below.)

What’s that? Still don’t think we need to replace the rules regarding money and its single useful purpose to society?

Again I will remind you that ALL money is funny…the only true cost is opportunity cost, the things we COULD HAVE DONE with those resources had they not been squandered to feather somebody’s personal nest.

In most cases a whole lot of nests would be a lot nicer than they are if those resources had been utilized in a wiser fashion.

Unfortunately, in these trying times it is difficult if not impossible to come to agreement on what constitutes ‘wisdom’.

Wise to me is outrageously stupid to a conservo-whacko! (who would rather not do anything with the resources in case the military needs them later!)

“Let society lounge in its own cesspool, the military will pay ‘top dollar’ for those resources that you want to waste on people who neither deserve or appreciate them…”

How do you deal with ‘whackos’ like that?

No irony should be lost on the fact that the ‘holy military’ (conservo-whackos literally ‘worship’ active duty service personnel, after they’re discharged they become ‘fucking civilians’ again so ‘fuck ‘em!) was established to protect us ALL.

But again I belabor the obvious when I point out that when it comes to conservo-whackos, ‘nothing go up top’ (may as well be a block of wood.)

They think what they think because that’s what they think!

Worse, they believe what they believe because somebody else told them that how things should be…so please don’t ask them to explain it, believing it is difficult enough!

But I digress…and I sincerely apologize for parading around on my favorite hobby horse in front of you all, shamelessly.

And you have to admit, it is difficult to cement your attention on the issue of ‘austerity for you’ while we waste billions on a military that serves the interests of the One Percent, coming from someone who preaches that ALL money is ‘funny’.

But my point isn’t ‘false austerity’ nor is it a bloated, useless military. It is GROSS MIS-MANAGEMENT!

And the real kicker is there ain’t a fucking thing we can do about it!

And I’m sure, by now, some of you want to slap me for reminding you AGAIN precisely how ‘powerless’ you are…

Well, I’m right here…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Mad World

Greetings good citizen,

Just as yesterday’s story about the ‘ascendancy’ of US energy reserves warned me that Saudi (real and easy to extract) supplies were approaching exhaustion, today’s headlines regarding the Soviet’s ‘redefinition’ of the term ‘treason’ speaks to me of the global assault on civil liberties.

First we must ask ourselves how unfortunate it is that the most famous Vladimir in modern history is ‘Vlad the Impaler’ and then we need to wonder if there’s a dubious connection in there somewhere.

Let’s have a look!

The law, which was drafted by the Federal Security Service, the main KGB successor agency known under its Russian acronym of FSB, also introduced a punishment of up to eight years for simply getting hold of state secrets illegally even if they aren't passed to foreign hands.

The FSB explained in a statement run by the ITAR-Tass news agency that the new clause better protects confidential information. It said the previous law, which dated back to the 1960s, failed to provide an efficient deterrence against foreign spies.

"Tactics and methods of foreign special services have changed, becoming more subtle and disguised as legitimate actions," the spy agency said. "Claims about a possible twist of spy mania in connection with the law's passage are ungrounded and based exclusively on emotions."

It may be helpful to first settle on a ‘true definition’ of what constitutes ‘treason’…often restricted, politically at least, to aiding ‘foreign enemies’ in ‘undermining’ the state.

Ironically, the rest of us have a simpler definition…one that makes the politicians among us, er, ‘uncomfortable’.

To the average citizen, treason is (and always has been) another word for betrayal. Our politicians are uncomfortable with this because much of what they do could easily be interpreted as ‘betrayal’…and we all know the penalty for treason is death.

So, somewhat bizarrely, few people have ever been, er, ‘officially’ prosecuted for betrayal because the people prosecuting them are as guilty as criminals they are judging.

I suspect most of you will agree that it is our failure to hold people in positions of public trust accountable for their action that has resulted in the, er, ‘dismantling’ of our civilization (by those who falsely claim to ‘own it’…a false claim their attorney’s placed in their heads!

Which is how these cretins will defend their actions…but we digress.

The ‘situation’ is disintegrating once the ‘traitors’ start redefining treason to cover their treachery!

This isn’t about betrayal, it is all about ‘discovery’ and keeping ‘treason’ hidden!

Would the revelation that Russia had a ‘stolen election’ on their hands lead to the ‘suspicion’ that it had also occurred in other countries as part of a global conspiracy to manipulate currencies and strip Western cultures of their hard won civil rights?

All for ‘the greater good’ (of the criminals?)

In case you haven’t noticed good citizen, this ‘national security state’ is a global phenomenon and it is omnipresent.

The question we must ask is who is being protected from whom? And the answer is disturbing because there is a whole boatload of criminal activity that isn’t being prosecuted, never mind reported while whistleblowers across the spectrum are being jailed without recourse!

Because that’s the ‘new reality’ good citizen.

You go along with the ‘big rip off’ or YOU get put away and they throw away the key because they don’t need a reason to lock you up.

If you make waves, they silence you.

Which brings us full circle to the question of ‘what kind of world do YOU want to live in?

One where criminals run roughshod over your life with impunity or one with ‘Justice for all’?

Because the ‘choice’ is YOURS!

Justice for all starts with YOU…but we digress, the real issue here is WHY treason is generally understood to mean one thing but isn’t actually defined that way…something it has in common with another ‘popular’ commodity…money.

How fucking odd is it that we all ‘think we know’ what money is but if you ask ten different people to define it, you will get ten different answers (and some of them considerably freaky!)

Well we have the same problem when it comes to ‘betrayal’…(which also gets bizarre treatment under the law.)

Which is to point out that our legislators have no problem with betraying the general public…worse, it is considered ‘common knowledge’ that anyone running for public office is in the ‘betrayal business’.

Which ISN’T what anybody is thinking when they mark their ballots. They expect the politician to be, at least generally, ‘true to their word’.

And most politicians would quibble that they are…generally…in the broadest sense of the term, and that they at least agree whole heartedly that they spoke words…albeit some of them ‘truer’ than others…

How do you try a weasel like that for treason?

Not by their words but by their actions, of course!

Since much of politics is ‘quid pro quo’ the ‘corresponding’ campaign donations and subsequent voting record tells the story.

But nobody is prosecuted for this easily traceable treason and we can only wonder why?

Would politicians suddenly abandon public service if they were held accountable for their voting record…or would the one percenter’s who regularly ‘purchase’ favorable legislation dislike the, er, ‘scrutiny’?

It’s a mad world good citizen and it will only get madder if you continue to do nothing.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

HSC

Greetings good citizen,

Um, markets ‘slid’ today giving back their inexplicable gains they made earlier this week.

Funny little game these Wall Streeters’ play but it has zero relationship to the ‘real’ economy.

Which brings us back to the basic Human social contract

What’s that you ask?

It is an important understanding between people that libertarians and the like say is a fairy tale.

Anyone who advocates ‘bootstrapping’ and YOYOism likes to pretend the human social contract doesn’t exist.

Ironically, it was the violating of this allegedly non-existent contract that resulted in ‘The Terror’ of the French Revolution.

Let us take a moment to lay down some background first:

Japan is quite different from the U.S. and Europe, with a homogeneous populace and a culture rooted in Confucian values and social hierarchies. Despite the many differences, including definitions of depression, I think it is self-evident that the rising insecurity and workplace changes in Japan result from long-term economic stagnation.

I suspect "new-type depression" may have some universal aspects, as rising insecurity and new demands in the workplace characterize Western economies as well.

New-type depression--NTD--(also called modern-type) is not a classic depression. It does not respond to anti-depressant medications, and it is triggered by events in the workplace--usually criticism from superiors. Those who exhibit the symptoms--difficulty focusing at work, physical symptoms of stress, etc.--tend to be in their 20s and 30s.

What we see here are the emerging effects of a people who tap dance on a landmine every day.

They don’t know from one day to the next if they will be able to support themselves.

Now our Libbies and their kissing cousins the Conservo-loonies, bootstrappers one and all, are calling the appearance of this malaise ‘a weakness’ in the individuals displaying the symptoms.

This would be incorrect. The reaction is caused by the violation of the human social contract, the REASON WHY we DON’T KILL ONE ANOTHER ON SIGHT!

Just stop for a second and let that sink in.

Why DON’T WE kill one another on sight? We are the ‘alpha predator’, it’s only natural that we ‘ought to’ eliminate competitors from our turf.

But wait, something’s wrong here. We are only top dog when we act ‘in concert’. All alone we are easily killed by goddamn viruses!

Hell, if it got the jump on you, a dog could kick your ass and kill you. In fact, on your own, there is a long list of wildlife that has the upper hand in a one on one encounter.

So we don’t dare to kill one another on sight. We only prevail in, er, ‘packs’.

But why do incidents like the terror occur?

Well, under those circumstances one ‘pack’ of humans oversteps it’s bounds and neglects its responsibility to the other…’packs’, if you will.

They take all of the ‘good stuff’ for themselves, leaving next to nothing for anyone else.

Now, the ‘unwritten contract’ states that we suffer or prosper TOGETHER.

But the greedheads don’t like that idea. They subscribe to the ‘I was here first’ principle.

If there is any suffering to be done it will fall upon those who didn’t grab what they could, when they could.

But that’s not the deal!

The deal is share and share alike!

So you can see how these little ‘impasses’ end up in the streets running in blood.

Because the people, looking for their share, now have to go out and take it from those who took it unjustly.

And yeah, it’s still ‘crowd vs. crowd.’

And my how that crowd has grown under the false prosperity sown to hide the theft.

Worse, it’s a not a question of ‘if’ we are about to hit the wall but ‘when’?

Again there will be cries of shock, ‘why is this happening’ when we saw it begin all of those years ago…and stood motionless as they whispered ‘it’s different this time’.

It’s NEVER different…and it’s not different this time.

What has to happen, since they pretty much walked away unscathed the last time, is they have to be, er, ‘taught’ not to violate the contract all over again.

Like they were taught in 1789…and why we are here again so soon after 1929 because we DIDN’T ‘make them pay’ then.

We won’t enjoy that luxury this time. Although that’s what they’re counting on, that we’re ‘too civilized’ to punish them…the way that they punish tin pot dictators who object to their ‘machinations’.

We are rapidly approaching a time when we can no longer tolerate the few to prey upon the rest of us.

Those who fail to appreciate the benefits of the human social contract will have those benefits (forcibly) withdrawn from them.

Like it or not, we are all in this together.

Thus do we need to decide, together, what we should do next.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Dog ; Barking (post 1111)

Greetings good citizen,

Um, haven’t heard the final analysis yet but it looks like last night’s debate might be called a ‘draw’.

Check out the top story in today’s NY Times:

TOP NEWS
Rivals Bring Bare Fists to Rematch
By JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY

In a charged and clenched debate, President Obama portrayed Mitt Romney as a former corporate raider, while Mr. Romney kept bringing the discussion back to Mr. Obama's record.

For all of my complaints about the corporate owned media, you can’t come closer to the raw truth than the paragraph we see above.

This single statement perfectly illustrates our plight as voters.

Neither man is ‘fit’ to become the next president (and it’s a fairly popular sentiment that the incumbent gained office under false pretenses.)

If he had a ‘mandate’ at all, it was to prosecute the Bush Administration for War Crimes.

What did he do with that mandate?

We got a Republican designed ‘mandatory’ healthcare bill.

And despite all of their squirming and promises to ‘repeal’ the new law…the lying fucks passed it in the first place…and their Insurance company Masters aren’t going to let them repeal it.

(And, naturally, it will be made to appear that the Democrats ‘stonewalled’ the repeal process.)

Like there are still Democrats in public administration! Ha!

The rich squeezed them out long ago…weirdly around the same time their bought and paid for boys were showering them with tax cuts. (Totally shattering the dynamics of politics.)

So if we back track to the beginning of today’s post the point would be the observation that neither candidate is, er, ‘equipped’ to straighten out our warped and twisted economy, nor would you want either one of them presiding over the pushing of the ‘reset button’.

Which is what it will take to get the global economy rolling again.

How do we fix our current mess given that we have no control over what our politicians do after we elect them?

How do you ‘fix’ that?

The >One Percent have a rather effective method of ‘controlling’ their bought and paid for politicians. If they don’t do EXACTLY as they are told, they get assassinated, simple as that.

Sometimes this actually involves killing but most times they use leverage to assassinate the character of the, er, ‘rebel’…like Elliot Spitzer.

He ain’t dead…but he may as well be.

The Emperor’s club incident thoroughly trashed his reputation.

How do we combat that?

You can bet your bottom dollar that most campaign funding today is tied to providing the contributor with ‘usable dirt’ he can hold over the candidates head.

Just a business deal, right? Nothing wrong with that, a simple ‘understanding’ between the purchaser and the provider of a service, that’s all.

Except this asshole just bought YOUR right to protest your mistreatment!

And now forty percent of the workforce doesn’t have work and the scum-bucket >One Percent says it’s not their problem!

How do you overcome that?

Short answer, you don’t.

NOW ‘what are YOU going to do about it’ (besides starve?)

Freeze?

If you don’t ‘see the need’ to address these shortcoming in the design of our political system, you probably won’t live to see them either.

And just to reiterate, even the founders agreed that the original set up was ‘deeply flawed’.

Worse, most thought it was a ‘temporary’ set-up, that it would be fixed later…before corruption got ‘too bad’.

Did you know that A Simple Plan is bullet proof right out of the box?

It doesn’t need ‘fixing’, it meshes with itself perfectly…and the ONLY people who don’t like it are CRIMINALS!

Although I must confess, the world is righteously full of ‘suspicious’ people who believe A Simple Plan is ‘too utopian’ for their tastes.

They condemn it on the ‘too good to be true’ basis.

And there is some potential for social harm through ‘mal-administration’ (criminals pushing for exemptions to the human anti-exploitation law. Which outlaws the buying and selling of ANYTHING ‘for personal gain’.

And there are the facts good citizen, the only way for the global economy to ‘recover’ is by pushing the ‘reset button’.

However, if the current crew presides over this ‘reset’ then we will need to do it again in about five years while NOTHING improves (for the average individual.)

And only a few will know that the whole process is merely a smokescreen they are using to avoid prosecution (for crimes against humanity.)

Ironically yet another ‘illusion of doing something’ where nothing gets done and nothing changes.

If we are to stop them, we need to stop them cold with a clearly defined plan of action.

A Simple Plan is that plan of action.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Lovely Ladies

Greetings good citizen,

Today we tackle the idea that this coming election will be decided by the nation’s female population…as they do, indeed, out number the males AND they’re more likely to vote!

Unhelpful is the fact that a large portion of the ‘conservative base’ is both female and elderly.

However, the largest segment of the female population in the US is militant and liberal.

The GOP’s corporate owned media has the task of convincing us that ‘enough’ men combined with the elderly women of the conservative movement will be sufficient to swing the election in the GOP’s favor.

Despite having a party platform drafted exclusively by men from the Religious Right.

The official 2012 Republican Party platform is a far-right fever dream, a compilation of pouting, posturing and policies to meet just about every demand from the overlapping Religious Right, Tea Party, corporate, and neo-conservative wings of the GOP. If moderates have any influence in today’s Republican Party, you wouldn’t know it by reading the platform. Efforts by a few delegates to insert language favoring civil unions, comprehensive sex education and voting rights for the District of Columbia, for example, were all shot down. Making the rounds of right-wing pre-convention events on Sunday, Rep. Michele Bachmann gushed about the platform’s right-wing tilt, telling fired-up Tea Partiers that “the Tea Party has been all over that platform.”

Given the Republican Party’s hard lurch to the right, which intensified after the election of Barack Obama, the “most conservative ever” platform is not terribly surprising. But it didn’t just happen on its own. Here are some of the people we can thank on the domestic policy.

As you can imagine, the article goes on to name names and provide the pedigree of each ‘contributor’…which can only make us wonder who will be drawing up the planks of the, er, ‘progressive’ party platform?

What will Libertarian Lou include to attract the ladies to the progressive banner besides NOT being republican?

Because the way things are going, not being Republican has a lot going for it already!

Twitchier still is how Republicans are predicting armed insurrection if THEIR BOY Obama is re-elected…

While those of us who will be voting for WHOEVER ELSE IS ON THE TICKET that ISN’T a ‘conservo-whacko’ (a category that includes the unchallenged incumbent) are predicting the same thing if their boy Mitt gets the ‘win’.

It's the classic 'Heads I won, Tails you lose' situation...(and we're all getting more than a little tired of it!)

I think I speak for the majority, the 99% if you will, regarding the consequences of a conservative victory this November.

The global economy was DESTROYED by ‘conservative policies’, further conservative, er, ‘rule’ will destroy our society and see a return of slavery to this world!

You’re already some ‘employer’s bitch’…how would you like to see that asshole handed a bill of sale with YOUR name on it?

What, you’d be thrilled?

Naturally, you’re thinking of the ‘upside’…if he ‘owns you’ he has to take care of you.

Take a fucking minute to consider the fucking downside of that.

Once your ‘upkeep’ exceeds your extractive value your more likely to be sold as ‘dog food’ (or perhaps the gross equivalent of ‘soylent green’, the fucking capitalist doesn’t care!) than to be allowed to muddle along in a ‘diminished capacity’.

Say watering the lawn or weeding the flower beds. It is far more likely you will end up ‘feeding the flowers’, literally!

That is what ‘hangs in the balance’ in the upcoming election, the one where all choices SUCK!

Of course, since I have ‘no control’ over the situation, I’m probably ‘exaggerating’ the situation a teensy bit.

But I’m willing to bet that more than a few of you find my ‘point of view’ at least within the realm of belief.

Because of ‘gradualism’.

You remember what ‘gradualism’ is, don’t you?

It’s that series of small, nasty steps the large institutions use to get you to accept the unacceptable.

Once upon a time the, er, ‘government’ used to sacrifice YOUR CHILDREN to ‘appease’ the ‘gods’!

Naturally that was BEFORE the separation of Church and State…now consider if you will just WHO wants to see them ‘reunited’…

Here we are, throwing a lot of shadows on the walls because the truth is only the ‘old’ vote. Kids don’t have (or don’t bother to ‘make) the time’.

And, ironically, there are now more ‘old people’ than ever before (the first wave of the Baby Boom has already retired!)

So how do YOU think ‘cutting entitlement programs’ is going to go?

Which is to ask, just how much faith do YOU have in the ballot box?

The ballot box did absolutely ZERO when it came to protecting your job OR your pension fund!

And we really can’t level the electric gattling gun at either political party…but there is a target right behind those ‘meat puppets’…the > One Percent.

Guess who is ‘responsible’ for off-shoring YOUR job and POCKETING your pension savings?

I know, don’t remind you…but hey, this is all going to be laid at ‘the girls’ feet, isn’t it?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner