Undebatable

Greetings good citizen,

So, tonight’s the night where we get to hear the conservatives debate one another. Which is to point out that I won’t have a reaction ready for you until tomorrow night.

I don’t usually watch these debates (because they are so divorced from reality as to be a frivolous waste of time.)

Which is to say that for the past thirty years the whole presidential campaign schtick has been so far removed from the actual issues facing our society as to be surreal.

You watch the whole time wondering…who are these people and what the fuck are they prattling about?

Like tonight’s debate will (supposedly) center on the economy and jobs.

And they’ll both ‘tilt at windmills’ and fabricate ‘pie in the sky’ plans that don’t have a chance in hell of succeeding because of the tapped out, unemployed consumer.

I mean how many fast food restaurant jobs can you have (considering the people who work in those places don’t eat the food.)

So we have tens of millions of burger and fry people standing around in empty restaurants, cleaning shit.

While the unemployed drive their Hondas and Toyotas to the mall, wondering why they can’t find a job…(because they’re over 40.)

Well, it’s one thing for me to sit here and criticize the non-existent economy and something else entirely to have someone who knows what he’s talking about show us EXACTLY why our collective asses are sucking pond water:

Without further ado, I give you Mr. Williams of SGS fame.

No. 472: GDP Revision, August Durable Goods, Household Income, New Home Sales
Subscription required September 27th, 2012

• Unusually Large 2nd-Quarter Revisions: Headline GDP Growth Dropped to 1.3% from 1.7%, Theoretically Equivalent GDI Dropped to 0.2% from 0.6%
• Plunging Automobile and Commercial Aircraft Sales Savaged Durable Goods Orders
• August Household Income Took a Hit

No. 471: August Housing Starts, Existing Home Sales
Subscription required September 19th, 2012

• Official Recovery Remains an Illusion
• Stagnant U.S. Economy Starts to Contract Anew
• Housing Starts and Existing Home Sales Still Are Bottom-Bouncing

No. 470: August CPI, PPI, Retail Sales, Industrial Production
Subscription required September 14th, 2012

• Fed Easing Aimed at Propping Banking System, Not Boosting Economy
• CPI and PPI Headline Inflation Highest Since June 2009
• Headline CPI Held at 0.6%, Instead of 1.0%, Due to Intervention Analysis?
• August Year-to-Year Inflation: 1.7% (CPI-U), 1.7% (CPI-W), 9.3% (SGS)
• Retail Sales Showing Consistent Pattern of Overstated Headline Activity Being Revised Lower in Following Month
• Monthly Production and Real Earnings Turn Down

No. 469: 2011 Income and Poverty Report, July Trade Balance
Subscription required September 12th, 2012

• Real Median Household Income Collapses to 16-Year Low;
• 2011 Income Below Levels of Late-1960s, Early-1970s
• Income Variance Hits Record High, Suggestive of Greater Financial and Economic Crises Ahead
• Trade Deficit Contained by Short-Lived Decline in Oil Prices

No. 468: August Employment and Unemployment, M3
Subscription required September 7th, 2012

• A Move to Open-Ended Monetization of Treasuries?
• Payroll Jobs Down by 261,000, Household-Survey Employment Down by 86,000, Since President Obama’s January 2009 Inauguration
• BLS Did Not Publish Actual July-to-August Unemployment Rate Change
• August Unemployment: 8.1% (U.3), 14.7% (U.6), 22.8% (ShadowStats.com)
• M3 Annual Growth Notches Higher
• Jump in Reported Inflation Likely in Week Ahead

No. 467: GDP Revision, Gold Standard
Subscription required August 29th, 2012
• GDI at 0.6%, GDP at 1.7%, GNP at 2.2%, All Plus-or-Minus Three Percentage Points
• GDP Recovery Remains An Illusion, Based on Understated Inflation
• Fiscal Conditions Have to Be in Balance for Gold Standard to Work

How many of the above factors will be discussed tonight?

How about none of them.

This is the ‘disconnect’ we keep feeling between the real world and the one politicians choose to talk about.

It may not be apparent to the occasional reader but what hit me in the eye is the unemployment rate. While the government figures keep dropping, the SGS (which is calculated the ‘old’ way) remains UNCHANGED!

You don’t suppose THAT will come up during tonight’s discussion, do you?

Seriously good citizen, what do you do when NEITHER candidate is the man for the job, punt?

Because that’s part of how we came to be here, every election it’s the SAME BULLSHIT, the right man of the job is NOT PRESENT!

Because every candidate (Since Kennedy) has to pass a ‘sniff test’ conducted by the One Percent…they aren’t going to let another Roosevelt into the Oval Office.

Where is Robisphere when you need him?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Monsters

I have made a lot of predictions over the years and one of them has been the ‘void of power’ play.

When a government is paralyzed into ineffectiveness, the threat of a coup looms eminent.

So it is that we are witnessing the impossible choices of an elected governing body.

Mr. Schäuble told the magazine Stern that he had sympathy for the Greeks, but added: “The Greek minimum wage is just dropping to the level of Spain. If the country wants to become competitive again, it has to sink.”

It has been sinking, Greeks say, as they cut their budgets and think about making Mr. Tsipras, only 37, their new prime minister, to shake up what everyone agrees has been a political system rotten with cronyism and corruption. While New Democracy appears to be running neck-and-neck with Syriza, many say they believe that Europe’s best chance to negotiate a lasting deal with Athens — and to keep down social unrest at home — would be if Syriza is in the government and part of whatever emerges.

“We have a brand new political landscape and it will change a lot more in the years to come, because the austerity collapsed the center,” said Nikos Xydakis, a political analyst and an editor at the daily newspaper Kathimerini. He added that the next Greek government would not have much staying power.

Geez, the things you see when you don’t have a gun! Here we have a crippled global economy and there is dipstick calling for ‘more of the same’!

These idiots are relentless!

We can truly ask if the return of slavery will put an end to the ruinous global ‘race to the bottom’?

What kind of MONSTERS are they? Just look at the question above! What else do you need to know?

While my excerpt comes from the end of the article, the beginning asks the question of whether or not the Greeks will be able to form a government under such impossible conditions.

We hear ‘Progressives’ complaining that ‘austerity’ doesn’t work and they’re right, austerity does NOT lay the groundwork for ‘prosperity’, it only provides the few that have with an excuse to withhold it from everyone else.

‘We’re promoting austerity!’ they cluck happily while their yacht pulls out of the harbor so they can feast like pigs unobserved.

The part that should amaze you good citizen is how nobody (in the media) points to this unbalance and states it is ‘unhealthy’.

Because the ‘propaganda machine’ tells us we all secretly aspire to be just like them (that has more than they can use!)

Oh can you wait until it’s YOUR TURN?

Some one of these days that lucky lottery ticket is going to justify your ongoing support of the ‘selfish assholes’ club.

How sad is it that it is the ONLY reason to vote Republican (not that who you vote for matters, they are ALL corrupt beyond belief.)

And once you join that other club, the one nobody prepare you for (Bankrupt lottery winners club) you might realize you’ve been rooting for the wrong team your whole life.

But ‘hope’ springs eternal an you just know if you did it once that you can do it again.

Although the odds are roughly the same as seeing God, for real, in person…with witnesses!

And still being unable to prove it but watcha gonna do?

Sadly, a full 20 percent of the human population falls into this ‘deluded’ category and gets played expertly by those who have a stake in maintaining the ‘status quo’.

To be a conservative is to support the status quo, wholeheartedly.

Even though the structure underlying the status quo (cheap, abundant energy) is about to collapse.

Now we return to the issue at hand, ‘will the global race to the bottom ‘end’ with the return of slavery?’

Sadly, I predict the answer will be ‘no’.

Because the slavers are NEVER satisfied, there will be minute, quantitative differences between slaves from here and slaves from there that will drive them to work the slaves they have to death in vain attempts to ‘outperform’ the slave holders from elsewhere.

Is a short, brutal life ‘as good as it gets’ for you and yours?

Keep voting Republican chuckle head and that will be what you will get…again, not that it matters who you vote for.

What matters, good citizen, are what you get to vote on!

If you don’t get to vote DIRECTLY on the laws you must live on then others will use those laws to enslave YOU!

Wake the fuck up, damn it!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Ballot Box

Greetings good citizen,

Markets opened ‘up’ but were heading back down as of mid-morning in fact it had the precise appearance of a ‘nosedive’…but you never know, those traders may pull out of it in time to save yesterdays record 293 point gain.

Again, for absolutely no apparent reason.

The global economy is still in operative and so is the global political system, as evidenced here

Before pressing on I would like to point out that the, er, ‘psychologist’ being quoted is a Brit and he provides us an example of what WE look like from across the pond.

Rest assured I will chime in with my ‘opinion’ as to why working people vote Republican.

Here's a more painful but ultimately constructive diagnosis, from the point of view of moral psychology: politics at the national level is more like religion than it is like shopping. It's more about a moral vision that unifies a nation and calls it to greatness than it is about self-interest or specific policies. In most countries, the right tends to see that more clearly than the left. In America the Republicans did the hard work of drafting their moral vision in the 1970s, and Ronald Reagan was their eloquent spokesman. Patriotism, social order, strong families, personal responsibility (not government safety nets) and free enterprise. Those are values, not government programs.

The Democrats, in contrast, have tried to win voters' hearts by promising to protect or expand programmes for elderly people, young people, students, poor people and the middle class. Vote for us and we'll use government to take care of everyone! But most Americans don't want to live in a nation based primarily on caring. That's what families are for.

One reason the left has such difficulty forging a lasting connection with voters is that the right has a built-in advantage – conservatives have a broader moral palate than the liberals (as we call leftists in the US). Think about it this way: our tongues have taste buds that are responsive to five classes of chemicals, which we perceive as sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury. Sweetness is generally the most appealing of the five tastes, but when it comes to a serious meal, most people want more than that.

Right out of the box I’d opine that this is about as ‘Ivy Tower’ as you can get!

I would further ‘opine’ that comparing British conservatives to our own ‘neo-cons’ is like comparing apples to elephants!

The Brits actually HAVE a monarchy, here the pretentious assholes merely pretend to be ‘gods elect’.

Why do our ‘working people’ vote for obviously odious conservo-nazis?

The answer is as simple as the spineless Jellyfish the Libertarians run as democrats!

The obnoxious Republicans may be repugnant but at least they stick together!

The spineless democrats stood and watched while the conservo-nazis stripped the working class of union protection and off-shored 99% of our productive capacity.

THAT’S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY INDEPENDENTS!

You don’t need ‘psycho-babble’ to figure this one out.

Did I mention I suspect the wing-dings at AlterNet (who are supposedly ‘progressive’ are in fact Libertarians?)

That is why we see so many articles like this one.

The Brits would call it ‘rubbish’ (and we should too!)

Which brings us to the union busting conservo-nazi’s victory in Wisconsin yesterday.

It seems the mindless masses in Cheeseland think the only time a politician should be ‘rebuked’ is when he is guilty of mal-administration.

So it appears the ‘union busting’ falls right into the governor’s bailiwick as far as the people of Wisconsin are concerned.

Again, we only have the ‘pretend democratic’ view on this upset. My gut tells me the corporate owned media reported the outcome they desired and flipped the public the middle finger!

But we have no way to prove that…and there will be no such thing as an independent probe to examine the ballots, not going to happen.

Pseudo-democracy is already on mighty shaky ground as it is.

We don’t need ‘proof positive’ that the media has been ‘fixing’ elections for the past hundred years to surface just months before the next presidential bid.

Yeah, it is little ‘demonstrations’ like yesterday that make the working voter throw in their lot with those who would exploit them.

Because ‘choice’ has become an illusion, although I must admit, the ‘illusion’ is wearing thinner all of the time.

Look at the choices being presented to us this November…a ‘burn and churn capitalist’ and a make believe Democrat who doesn’t deserve a second term.

Yes, we need look no further than the current occupant of the White House to learn why ‘working people’ vote against their own interests…because voting their interests produced nothing…and that’s the hell of it good citizen.

We come full circle to the ‘what can we do about this’ problem?

They have already shown us the outcome of the November elections and sadly that outcome is ‘more of the same regardless of who they crown.

And most of us have had more of this than we can stand.

Will we make it to November?

We’ll see.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Paradise Lost

Greetings good citizen,

As most of you are aware, I don’t personally scour the web looking for topics to write about…mostly because I don’t see the need.

There are some very good ‘aggregators’ out there who provide some amazing insight on the big picture every day with pretty much ‘one stop shopping’.

Today’s offering is one I haven’t addressed before, it is something that has been conspicuous only by its absence

While most of you don’t have an hour and fifteen minutes to watch the accompanying video, part of the topic of Mr. Hedge’s talk is ‘where are the ‘intellectuals’?

Chris Hedges: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt


The video starts after the introductions.

"Unfettered, unregulated capitalism...turns everything into a commodity, human beings become commodities, the natural world becomes a commodity, that it exploits until exhaustion or collapse. In essence it cannibalizes itself, and this is the process that we are undergoing."

Chris Hedges


The essence of statism, of the far left or the far right, is to objectify the individual and diminish their value to some measurement held by the state itself.

This is what can turn market capitalism into corporatism and then fascism, often in a reaction against the rising of the people against economic repression of crony capitalism and corruption.

Hedges helps to illustrate this. He is certainly further to the left of my own more centrist views, but I find his perspective interesting. And certainly a refreshing perspective given the corporatist and dehumanizing skew to most modern American dialogue where all creation is weighed in the balance of money.

I’ll synopsize as best I can for those of you who don’t have the hour plus to watch this most enlightening video. (Me, I’ve got nothing but time…sad, isn’t it?)

What I enjoyed most about this particular talk is hearing ideas I’ve been saying for years finally repeated by someone who matters!

What he does is walk the listener through the, er, ‘tearing down’ of the liberal establishment.

Most gratifyingly, he then agrees (with me) that there aren’t any liberals (of consequence) anymore.

He then goes on to point out another major problem I have yet to hear anyone with an audience announce, he goes on to say we DON’T HAVE THE TOOLS TO FIX OUR CURRENT MESS!

Those tools exist on the inside only! If our politicians refuse to clean their own house we can only look on in horror…or take matters into our own hands.

Those are our ‘choices’.

I strongly suggest we hang all of the sitting politicians before we even start to clean up the mess they made.

Troubleshooting 101, FIRST ‘eliminate the cause of the problem’, and THEN clean up the mess!

But I digress!

He goes on to explain how our pseudo-democracy was hijacked by the same people who want to erase ‘the New Deal’.

The most disturbing part of this is the hijackers disregard for the enmity they are creating among the portion of the population that does the heavy lifting.

Which is to ask if the ‘Jack ass Tea Partiers’ realize they are going to be the ‘ingrates’ new/replacement Jack ass?

But let’s back up a step and address the disturbing political meme of ‘those who want to erase the New Deal’.

Long deemed the political equivalent of the electoral ‘third rail’, most politicians have steered clear of the ‘self-funded’ social retirement system.

Now they have the chutzpah to call it an ‘entitlement program’!

(If YOU Paid for it baby, you bet your sweet backside YOU’RE ‘entitled’ to it!)

But NO! These mother-fuckers want to turn the public retirement system over to Wall Street (so the ONLY ones capable of retiring will be the fat cat bankers!)

[Can’t hammer a nail to save their worthless lives but you should see ‘em chisel!]

it should be lost on no one that the current president ‘endorses’ the idea of cutting ‘entitlement spending’ while believing in a ‘strong military’.

You don’t need me to tell you that WE (citizens of the US) have become the biggest ‘sponsors of terror’ on the freaking planet.

Something ‘everybody knows’…

The question following that one would be…what are we going to do about it?

I can always hope but I suspect those behind the destruction of our civilization already know when they squeeze the trigger it will trip a lot of other, er, booby traps.

Which is to opine that the wheels won’t come ‘flying’ off the wagon of civilization, they’re gonna get ‘blown off’.

If they’re not ready they’re gonna get crushed…

But so is everybody else.

Oh, one last tidbit, a nagging little thing Mr. Hedges said in citing an appearance on NPR concurrent with an interview of Paul Krugman.

A disturbing comment, made more disturbing by the notion of ‘if this is the ‘prevailing attitude’ of the so-called intelligensia, was how climate change was going to trump the financial crisis.

Could this be the thinking behind the ‘engineered collapse’ of Western civilization?

I sure as hell hope not.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Depressing

Greetings good citizen,

What a lovely day in the neighborhood we’re enjoying, naturally we’re enjoying it for all of the wrong reasons. Stock markets around the globe are ‘cliff-diving’ for the third consecutive day but I don’t own any stock so, eh, who gives a shit?

But, weirdly, this doesn’t bode well for that fleeting thing we watch the stock market for…

And what IS that fleeting thing we try to track via shareowner prices?

A little thing we call ‘social stability’.

Why watch the stock markets as a monitor of social stability?

Because if ‘Richie Rich’ is doing poorly then the shit tends to run ‘downhill’ and your chances of getting a raise goes straight to hell with it.

That’s the trouble with a system that depends on wealthy ‘doing better’ so they may decide to ‘spread it around a little’, feeding the ‘prosperity cycle’.

Let’s have a little look at how our pal Richie is doing:

Weak U.S. Hiring Adds to Global Gloom
By SHAILA DEWAN 10:06 AM ET

The United States economy gained a net 69,000 jobs in May, the Labor Department said, a dismal showing as the unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent.

Watch how quick the idiot Conservo-loonies are to pin this economic ‘bump in the road’ on the incumbent.

Ironically, they’d be correct (because he has done nothing to fix the irreparable financial sector that melted down four years ago.) But that’s not why the Conserv-tards will blame him, they will blame him for not giving people who already have more money than they know what to do with, MORE tax cuts!

Funny how insanity never corrects itself.

Worse is how the corporate owned media keeps repeating this same sad one note tune.

Economix: Reaction to May Jobs Report, in Tweets
More From Economix: | Spring Slowdown | The Fed | Lagging Recovery

Wall Street Falls on Jobs Data 10:16 AM ET

The immediate reaction from Congressional leaders to the grim jobs report signaled little movement toward breaking the long, partisan deadlock over fiscal policy.

Euro Zone Unemployment Rises to a Record 11%
By DAVID JOLLY 9:11 AM ET

Ireland on Friday appeared headed toward adoption of the European Union’s fiscal compact, but stocks fell in Europe after data showed rising joblessness in the euro zone.

Car Sales Keep Up Healthy Pace
By BILL VLASIC 16 minutes ago

Chrysler reported a 30 percent gain in new-vehicle sales for May, Ford said its sales climbed 13 percent and General Motors reported an 11 percent increase.

Apparently people who are not paying their mortgage have plenty of money to buy new cars, funny how one thing makes room for the other.

Because inflation is OOC and NOBODY (outside the ‘executive suite) is getting a raise…so that leaves ‘the homeless’ to support the auto industry!

It may also explain why, in a time of sky-high fuel prices that SUV’s are still as popular as ever.

How sad is it that ‘living space’ now trumps fuel economy?

Which is another ‘red flag’ signaling just how ‘unsustainable’ our current social model has become.

The thing YOU need to wrap your head around is just how far those currently on the top will go to retain their top dog status?

Would they go as far as to ‘exterminate’ you and yours?

Just an opinion here but I’m gonna ‘opine’ yup!

In a heart beat good citizen.

It’s this goofy kind of economic calculus that throws the ‘supply and demand’ theory right out the window.

A strange thing occurs when people start using murder to ‘re-balance’ the equations,once you cross that line,‘more’ is always ‘better’.

It brings us back to the basic question of whether or not a whole planet is enough for a single capitalist?

Ironically, it isn’t…because in order to be a ‘capitalist’ (and not just a monkey marooned on a planet by itself) the capitalist monkey needs slaves to harvest the planet’s resources for him.

Can’t be a capitalist without slaves.

Now there’s a thought to chew over in your mind!

Funny how that ‘freedom’ thing keeps biting us in the backside when we least expect it.

So as the week draws to a close and ‘Massa’ lets you have your ‘two whole days off’, (unpaid), sit back for a moment and contemplate just how ‘free’ you aren’t.

If you dare.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Dumb and Trusting

Greetings good citizen!

Happy Monday! In a disturbing display of ‘nowhere else to go’ the stock markets (around the globe) are on the rebound once again…for absolutely no discernable reason!

Hard to say what is more disturbing, the fact that the markets are rising irrationally or the fact that this phenomenon has occurred in ‘lockstep’ for years?

Add to this the question of why no one is crying ‘stop thief’ and you have a real puzzler on your hands. (Which SHOULD direct you attention to the strangely mute corporate owned media. But by now this surprises no one.)

(Whenever stocks rise ‘irrationally’ your purchasing power gets diluted…sadly, when stocks fall your purchasing power does NOT increase…it’s a one way street.)

Anyway, I find myself, once again, cast in the role of ‘naysayer’. Alternet (one could suppose) in an attempt to be ‘proactive’ regarding the economy is promoting the ‘capitalist solution’ to the current capitalist created debacle.

Unknown is if this is due to the irrational belief that ‘free markets are self correcting’ of if there is some other twisted and tortured logic in play, let me repeat, there is NO CAPITALIST SOLUTION for our economic woes!

You can no sooner spend your way out of debt than you can drink yourself sober.

Yet we have this tripe to contend with

The New Economy Movement is already energetically involved in an extraordinary range of activities, but it faces large-scale, daunting challenges. The first of these derives from the task it has set for itself—nothing less than changing and democratizing the very essence of the American economic system’s institutional structure.

Even viewed as a long-range goal, the movement obviously confronts the enormous entrenched power of an American political economic system dominated by very large banking and corporate interests—and bolstered by a politics heavily dependent on the financial muscle of elites at the top. (One recent calculation is that (the) 400 individuals at the top now own more wealth than the bottom 160 million.)

[Er, needless to say there are more than 300 million US citizens so who are these 160 million they’re referring to? There are 230 million working aged US citizens, which again, misses the mark by a wide margin…Chilling thought, is the 160 million the total US population LESS the 'surplus population' this so-called 'new economy' has no use for? This leaves the deeply disturbing question, good citizen, of precisely 'who' is 'surplus'?]

A second fundamental challenge derives from the increasingly widespread new economy judgment that economic growth must ultimately be reduced, indeed, even possibly ended if the dangers presented by climate change are to be avoided—and if resource and other environmental limits are to be responsibly dealt with.

So it that it? All we need do is ‘democratize’ the decision-making process and whamo, all will be well?

How much you want to bet when it comes to dividing up the work, management is going to take the standard position: you guys baby sit production, we’ll shuffle the papers (for twice what they pay you!)

Does anybody else notice a certain ‘sameness’ about this arrangement? What is ‘democratization’ supposed to ‘solve’ precisely?

It is suppose to provide workers with a ‘stake’ in the company, an incentive to do more and to do it better.

To lift them above the ‘Cog in the machine’ feeling perpetuated by the management attitude ‘You could all be replaced by trained monkeys’.

What does the worker get out of this ‘democratization’?

NOTHING!

You get a ‘bonus’ instead of a raise and you get more of your heath insurance expense dumped on you, (by a company making billions!) and then you get ‘downsized’ the moment they decide to sell your business group.

WTF!

Oh, and you think they are going to let YOU ‘vote’ on issues like hiking your own health insurance or cutting your vacation/sick time?

Never happen!

So what are these turkeys preaching besides the old conservative canard of ‘patience asshole, patience’.

The problem with being ‘too patient’ is you wind up dead before anything gets done…if ever.

And that’s part of the problem we’re facing right now.

People see the global financial system is on the rocks and they get hopeful, thinking ‘they’ll have to fix things now’ (and assholes like Alternet aren’t helping any!)

When in fact those who counsel ‘patience’ like things just the way they are! They’ll make you wait forever if you’re dumb enough!

And sadly, there ain’t a lick of difference between dumb and trusting…

Just because they have proven they don’t know what they’re doing (well actually they DO know what they’re doing, the problem is they don’t give a shit!) doesn’t mean they are suddenly going to start listening to you!

There is no ‘capitalist’ fix for the situation we’re caught up in. ‘Broken’ goes beyond the financial piece of the puzzle all the way to the justice piece.

If we don’t fix the justice system our species is screwed, plain as that.

A Simple Plan accomplishes this goal in a way EVERYBODY can understand (although, admittedly, not in a way EVERYBODY is going to like!) [The caveat being if you don’t like A Simple Plan then YOU are a CRIMINAL.] How about them apples?

Bad news boys and girls, this ain’t Heaven, we can’t all have it the way we wants it, all of the time.

If we can just get past our personal desires this place doesn’t have to be a notch above hell either…

The decision, as always, is yours.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Elected?

Greetings good citizen,

Almost as disturbing as yesterday’s post about the ‘conservative tri-fecta’ assualt on the White House is today’s story expressing ‘guarded optimism that the party of ‘1 in 5’ can wrest control from the Democrats if THEY DON’T SCARE TOO MANY INDEPENDENTS!

For Senate Republicans, 2012 is starting a lot like 2010.

They have a shot at taking control away from Democrats as long as insurgent conservatives who are defeating the party's more establishment candidates in primaries don't frighten too many independent voters like they did two years ago.

Deb Fischer, a little-known state senator, became the latest unexpected Senate GOP nominee Tuesday, rallying late to upset the favored — and better funded — choices of both the party's mainstream and tea party establishments: Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning and state Treasurer Don Stenberg.

Her victory occurred just a week after tea party and other conservative groups embraced Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who scored an arguably bigger upset — knocking off six-term Sen. Richard Lugar, the Senate's longest-serving Republican.

USA today prints some pretty outrageous stuff and this is just another example of how far ‘off the rails’ the predominantly conservative media has become.

Worse, it is this very same media that tells us who won the election.

So the answer to ‘gridlock’ in Washington is more ‘Tea Partiers’, eh?

How fucked up is it good citizen that the only 30,000 member strong ‘Tea Party movement’ is (well) financed by the > One Percent?

Just who are the ‘rank and file’ members of the Tea Party movement? Why they are the denizens of the dementia unit at the local nursing home!

And yet the corporate owned media has the audacity to claim this is the wind beneath the Tea Party’s wings…people who forget what the inside of a voting booth looks like!

Worse, the last person they REMEMBER voting for is Ike. (One of the last ‘true’ Republicans.)

Which only belabors the main point, Tea Partiers are OLD (and I’m no spring chicken myself!) hardly ‘representative’ of the general public but isn’t that just how the deep pocketed like it?

Yes, good citizen, just how much bullshit will you sit still for while the corporate owned media spoon-feeds it to you?

Because we’re going to be fed shovelfuls of it between now and November, then we’ll be expected to believe it happened again.

Then it’s four more years of waiting for another…chance.

When the truth is we don’t stand a chance. The cheaters have stolen the entire process and we have only one way to deal with it and this is to reject what can politely be called ‘the chute’.

Understand we’ve gotten where we are today via ‘non-participation’ so merely ‘ignoring’ the voting booth will do us no good.

We’ve got to ‘reject’ the entire process, vigorously!

Which, of course, assumes we even get that far. Last election I predicted we wouldn’t make it that far and was proven wrong…but what the hell, I never said I was psychic.

THIS time we have even less reason to subject ourselves to ‘more of the same’ but we can already see that is all there is going to be on the, er, ‘menu’.

Greece, Italy and France have all, er, ‘rejected’ austerity but we haven’t seen any lasting results. The Greeks can’t form a government and the Italians can't arrive at a consensus and the new French Prime Minister has already started ‘back-pedaling’ on some of his campaign promises…

Which is also what happened when Obama took office.

Worse, letting Obama be re-elected sends exactly the wrong message to Wall Street (who has contributed mightily to Obama’s re-election campaign…)

So, do YOU see an ‘alternative’ here to more of the same?

No…because you aren’t supposed to.

THAT is the message the > One Percent is sending to US!

So HOW do we reject this blind chute that robs us of our choices?

Do we petition THEIR courts?

Like the faux America United ploy, who do we get to run against such a ‘stacked deck’?

Who would be, er, ‘selfless’ enough to go and stand up against a brick wall of bought and paid for opposition?

Because YOU KNOW there isn’t a chance in hell of our man occupying the White House for longer than a few months before the ‘money power’ paid to have him (and his family) assassinated.

Nope, good citizen, the ‘old way’ of doing things is gone for good!

Which is both good news and bad news.

Good because the old way was corrupt beyond belief, bad because the current supporters of the old way want to go back to the ancient way of doing things, which will really suck!

Think they are ‘insufferable’ now…just wait until we HAVE TO address them as Your Lordship or Sir!

Then we’ll all have to ask ourselves if it isn’t better to die on our feet rather than live on our knees…(and we all know ‘feet’ wins, every time!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Austerity

Greetings good citizen,

I’d opine that we just got one step closer to the ‘final unraveling’ that will cause our financial system to collapse and throw the world’s ‘puppet governments’ into, er, ‘disarray’.

The inevitable ‘push-back’ against crippling ‘austerity’ leaves the bankers with no alternative…I said four years ago there is no way to use the system to repair the system, the tools don’t exist!

So what does that tell you good citizen?

That when this crap-storm finally exhausts itself, the only alternative left will be the ‘reset switch’.

The question is do YOU want the fuckers responsible for this disaster to be the ones pushing the reset button?

Your answer SHOULD BE a resounding NO…but how much ‘choice’ do you think you are going to have in this matter?

Try NONE.

Worse, they get to keep ALL of the shit they’ve stolen so far and YOUR circumstances will barely change!

Click, click-boom, Good citizen!

The likely ‘presto-chango’ they are going to pull will be the ‘depersonalization’ of the Real Estate markets.

You will be ‘relieved of your obligation’ to pay for the real estate you’ve purchased (but that obligation will be replaced with a ‘rental fee’ (for maintenance and upkeep, surly you understand…just like condo fees although you’ll still be expected to shovel the driveway and cut the grass.)

You see, good citizen, this will be a ‘win-win’ for our overlords. Labor will be free to move where it is needed now that housing is no longer part of the equation.

Hey, (in the beginning anyway) you’ll be automatically let out of your lease if you are moving out due to a job change…later this might prove troublesome but in the beginning they are more interested in showing you what nice guys they are! (And how lucky you are to have them running things!)

But wait a minute Slim…once again we have a myopic ‘Merikan warning us to beware of the decline of the US

Um, the old codger was 82…and it is not ‘uncommon’ for people that age to have a US centric worldview, but seriously good citizen, when this CF falls apart. More than just the US is gonna come ‘unglued’:

Now in principle, the Big Picture seems simple enough, though devilishly complex in the details. We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class. But this maggot class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national consequences -- which means moving capital and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx darkly remarked, “Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of globalization his meaning has come clear.

The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).

Here again Marx had a telling phrase: “Crisis of under-consumption.” When you maximize unemployment and depress wages, people have to cut back. When they cut back, businesses they formerly supported have to shrink or fail, adding their own employees to the ranks of the jobless, and depressing wages still further. End result: something like Mexico, where a small, filthy rich plutocracy rules over an impoverished mass of desperate, uneducated, and hopeless people.

Um, Marx made some insightful observations into the ‘fuck you, pay me’ system but ‘the commune’ was not the solution/alternative he made it out to be.

Being an Anarchist, I’m not too fond of Communists.

But this isn’t about me or dead ideologies.

It’s about YOU and the, er, collapse of life as you have come to know it.

For folks my age, the world we were raised in is gone, irretrievably.

Many of you were born not knowing anything different from what you see today. The Department of Homeland Security and the unilateral, extra-judicial execution of, er, ‘terrorists’ by killer drones were NOT the way things ‘always were’…

But in another generation they will be.

The road ahead is still yours to decide.

Will you choose unity and cooperation or will you choose phantom bogeymen and (mostly angry) spirits in the sky?

You’re the adult now, you choose.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Hero worship

Greetings good citizen,

Recently having a bad experience with GE’s personnel department has left a bad taste in my mouth regarding my (now almost twenty years in the rearview mirror) ‘former employer’.

I sit and curse at the TV when I see the ‘Thank you GE’ commercials come on. The ad (falsely) paints them as ‘saviors’ when there are tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of ‘former’ GE employees who remember things going down somewhat differently than these cheesy commercials would lead you to believe.

Although make no mistake about it, at GE it is a given that you would be ‘plenty thankful’ to work there…because the alternative is usually something akin to dumpster diving…

Anyway it seems I’m not the only one who noticed this attempt to whitewash the reputation of the leader of the global race to the bottom…

The GE ads skillfully trigger a sense of warmth as they show GE workers expressing pride in their skilled work, satisfaction in assisting severely-ill patients, a profound sense of teamwork crossing racial and gender lines, and a deeply-felt mission based on the slogan: "GE Works." To highlight just a few elements of GE's public-relations offensive:

1) In one ad, GE workers at the Waukesha, Wis. Medical Equipment Division, which makes magnetic resonance imaging machines, X-ray machines and other cutting-edge medical devices, are shown getting their-much-cherished wish of meeting a busload of cancer patients whose recovery was aided by GE's medical products.

Unmentioned, however, is the fact that GE has transferred the headquarters of the Medical Equipment Division to Beijing, China. "Waukesha will not be doing GE's innovations, which will now be centered in China," said Chris Townsend. "This doesn't mean that the Waukesha plant will close right away, but the company's advances will be taking place in China and Waukesha will be making more out-of-date products. GE will be bringing in the new machines from China," Townsend adds.

Oddly, depending on which ad you view, the workers practically prostrate themselves, thanking GE for a ‘second chance’ when the other big employer in town followed GE’s lead and left for Beijing!

And naturally, if you weren’t really paying attention, most of the commercials are being made in ‘right to work’ states, meaning the chances are good that the employees are ’unorganized’.
Perhaps more disturbing is the ease with which GE could shutter such plants if the Union even ’threatened’ to get a foothold…

Just our worthless politicians, doing what they do best…

Which brings us full circle to the question there is currently no debate over, what is the ‘purpose of government?’

Listening to the right/conservatives/(closet Libertarians) we would have the government’s sole purpose would be to provide for the ‘nation’s defense’.

Which is ironic because government’s ‘primary function’ is to insure that the needs of society are ‘equitably met’ and government’s principle responsibility is to PROTECT ITS CITIZENS from the PREDATIONS OF THE PRIVILEGED!

Something the political parties of this nation have FAILED AT MISERABLY for the past FORTY YEARS!

And, ironically, this ‘failure’ is directly attributable to a situation that OWS brought to the fore of the national stage just last year.

What situation was that good citizen?

It was the ‘re-definition’ of who was and was not a ‘member of society’.

The fact that those who (could and ultimately DID) BUY the government they wanted became the government’s ‘primary focus’.

And, naturally, it was the immensely smaller but considerably richer Republican party that got (and bought) all of the necessary influence.

So the question is, do we REALLY ‘vote against ourselves’, good citizen?

The answer is a resounding NO…mostly because not enough of us vote, but that doesn’t matter either way because they can jigger the ballot box six ways to Sunday if it serves their purposes.

Although there is one thing you can be certain of this November, serious levels of ‘voter dissatisfaction’ and a close to zero tolerance for ‘more of the same’.

The riots will be incredible.

And the corporate owned media will be at a loss to explain them away…so they won’t even try.

Which is to opine (and I’m always giving my opinion around here) that ‘the coup’ (of the royals) will NOT be televised.

The, er, >One Percent knows they cannot maintain the charade of the ballot box indefinitely…and the public outrage over the ‘lack of action’ will force them to sweep aside the pretense that this is all due to ‘incompetence’ and (attempt) to seize control.

Sadly, they already know they will fail.

Their actions will be driven by the desire to heighten public anger; to insure that the carnage is as widespread as possible.

Worse, many of them will lead rebellions against their own kind!

How will you know you are being led by a ‘pretender’? Because their rhetoric will be more than a little ‘Republican’ flavored.

Their talk will be about ‘family values’ and ‘rugged individualism’. While they stay behind the scenes to ‘direct’ the battles your comrades will fight and die in.

Ironically it will be their ‘uncanny ability’ to ferret out the strongholds of their former friends that will cement their leadership role…

While they surround themselves with the most brutal (and stupid followers) they can find.

So if loyal but stupid gets promoted over brave and competent, chances are good ‘your leader’ is one of them!

We have a lot of work to do good citizen, and many battles to fight before we rest.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Post 900, The Difference

Greetings good citizen,

While the ‘cracks’ in our civilization appear to have widened visibly overnight we still haven’t reached ‘the end of the line’ the Doomsday crowd is ‘preparing’ for.

I’m gonna have to ‘go off’ on that topic in the not too distant future, partly because of the ‘bird-brains’ they have ‘judging’ these psycho’s efforts.

There’s a dynamic at play in this whole ‘hoarding to survive’ meme that is more then a little ironic, considering how we got to this point in the first place.

Behind this latest collapse of ‘Western Civilization’ is ‘more for me’ capitalism.

Now just how ironic is it that some of these greedy fucktards are trying to ‘buy their way out’ of a situation CREATED by this very same GREED?

Worse, they are justifying what they do as ‘protecting’ THEIR food source from, er, ‘predators’ (formerly known as ‘employees’! Although let’s not forget Chumps and Muppets!)

If you don’t have enough bullets to ‘kill ‘em all’ I’ve got bad news for ya, it’s not YOUR food, it’s everybody’s!

But, (naturally) I digress.

Today’s offering shows us the true dynamics of civilization, (a dynamic the so-called conservatives ignore!)

Put this in the context of only conservatives running in this fall’s election and howl with dismay!

The view that the private sector is the independent engine of economic growth is obviously false. It’s time for an articulated economic framework which describes how the modern state has worked in an active co-venture with the for-profit sector.

Who knows what kind of tax system on debt position the nation would be in if we had created a venture capital bank that explicitly shared in commercial revenues as all venture capitalists do? Put another way, what would a public finance system look like if the public shared the private profit and personal wealth that was made with the help of our money?

Elizabeth Warren has clarified how the social web and the physical infrastructure that government supports is essential to market function, growth and wealth creation. It makes sense to go a step further and clarify how government action and public dollars serve as a direct partner with the private sector in advancing growth and wealth. Then, it would not be so easy to take the money and run.

Government’s ‘JOB’ is to provide for (all) of society (not just the One fucking Percent.)

UNDERSTAND, it is the government that gives legitimacy to EVERYTHING (including religion!) thus when your government undergoes a ‘hostile take-over’ like ours obviously has (and I’m talking world-wide here, good citizen.) You end up with ‘mis-management’ on the scale we’re currently witnessing!

Mis-management that leads to situations like this

Which are the Middletowns of our new era of precarious living? Is it Muncie, whose denuded industrial landscape tells a familiar story of Rust Belt decline? Or is it the new industrial landscapes of Smyrna and Spring Hill, Tennessee, where jobs that look a lot like those the residents of Muncie once had have become posts for a downwardly mobile working class? Or is it Sun Belt boom-cities like Nashville, where the promise of postindustrial transcendence has created its own reserve army of low-wage service employment, condemning many to lives of permanent poverty and vulnerability? Or is it some byzantine conurbation of them all, a commons of the American Nightmare—a Middletown of the 99 percent?

Muncie was my first stop, for it seemed as good a place as any to begin a tour of working-class life in America, to discover what it once had been and what it had become.

Which is to point out what you’ve all know all along…what happened here was no ‘accident’. Nor was it what they try to pass it off as, ‘incompetence’.

The destruction of our civilization (by and for the greedy) was quite deliberate.

The part that sucks is THEY will insist it is OUR FAULT they did what they did.

And much carnage could have been averted IF we had stopped them sooner…BUT, by then they had the keys and were firmly in the proverbial ‘driver’s seat’, all we could do then was to wait for the inevitable ‘crash’!

Um, the reason we are standing PRECISELY where we were almost a hundred years ago is because LAST TIME, the fucking perps ‘walked’, nobody ‘paid the price’ for destroying the economy.

Which leads me to opine that this time they will pay in spades!

[Either that or we will abandon the entire concept of living ‘socially’ and become ‘lone predators’, killing (or enslaving) one another on sight until our eventual extinction. (Which for some species won’t be soon enough, given what we’ve done to their habitat.)]

But I strongly doubt the latter option (as attractive as it might sound to a pin-headed Libertarian…)

So as you wade through the offal that masquerades as ‘news’ try not to get too discouraged, the old world is passing away…but a new one is about to rise…and it is this new one that we need to fight for!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

False Flag

Greetings good citizen,

In a bad instance of ‘foreshadowing’ the headines are predicting a ‘positive reaction’ to another alleged ‘breakthrough’ in the yet to be settled negotiations over stupefying Greek debt. Which is to say markets around the world are currently down as of this moment.

How does that saying/advice go? Buy the rumor, sell the news?

How sad is it that the inability to distinguish between the two is the quickest path to insolvency?

But this is NOT today’s topic, no.

Today we return to the ongoing False Flag operation to give Anarchy ‘a bad name’.

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.

Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist. John Zerzan, one of the principal ideologues of the Black Bloc movement in the United States, defended “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the rambling manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, although he did not endorse Kaczynski’s bombings. Zerzan is a fierce critic of a long list of supposed sellouts starting with Noam Chomsky. Black Bloc anarchists are an example of what Theodore Roszak in “The Making of a Counter Culture” called the “progressive adolescentization” of the American left.

In Zerzan’s now defunct magazine Green Anarchy (which survives as a website) he published an article by someone named “Venomous Butterfly” that excoriated the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN). The essay declared that “not only are those [the Zapatistas’] aims not anarchist; they are not even revolutionary.” It also denounced the indigenous movement for “nationalist language,” for asserting the right of people to “alter or modify their form of government” and for having the goals of “work, land, housing, health care, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.” The movement, the article stated, was not worthy of support because it called for “nothing concrete that could not be provided by capitalism.”

Here’s the ‘money quote’ “They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist.”

The question, good citizen is if you think this ‘resisting the resisters’ bullshit is a mere ‘coincidence’?

These animals are NOT ANARCHISTS, Anarchy means ‘Rules without rulers’, so who are these ‘hell no, I will not obey’ morons?

They’re fucking Libertarians!

Why doesn’t the corporate owned media correct this, er, ‘misunderstanding’?

The corporate owned media doesn’t want you to even ponder the idea that you are perfectly capable of governing yourself. Anarchy would be a bad thing, a very bad thing for the capitalist.

As we can see from the article, ‘Black Bloc’ Anarchists also happen to be capitalists!

Now, think, think, think…who else happens to be rabidly pro-capitalist and anti everything else?

Who could it be?

Might it be those Republican wannabes, the Libertarians?

In fairness, they only put on their Republican faces when they’re trying to appear ‘respectable’ (and they come off looking like ‘the crazy uncle’ instead!)

True anarchists DO NOT support the exploitation of their fellow humans which means (true) anarchists DO NOT support capitalism BECAUSE it is ‘predatory’!

Anarchists hate ‘hierarchy’ and that’s what attracts the Libbies…they think this is the basis of ‘common ground’ between the militantly Libertarian right and the (largely clueless) anarchist left.

Communism is a hierarchy with the Party on top and the workers on the bottom. Now the commies promised that the Party/State would ‘fade away’…one day.

Took less than 70 years for that pipe dream to be proven false!

Civilization, by necessity, needs order. Nothing happens when it’s supposed to happen on its own!

So even (true) Anarchists ‘accept’ the necessity of ‘the state’, what they reject is the uneven playing field that the ‘usual suspects’ use to seize and then maintain control.

Understand, our ‘Hell no, I will not obey! Anarchists (Libertarians) will suddenly change their tune and become the preachers of conformity they were raised to be!

“Question not your lot in life for it is ‘God’s will’! Who are you to question God?”

(Said the man who claims to speak for God!)

This is another ‘conundrum’, True Anarchists are ‘usually’ atheists (or at least agnostic) I’m willing to bet these ‘Black Bloc’ pretenders all have Christian crosses dangling from gold chains around their blessed necks!

I have no evidence so I’m just speculating here…although it fits, doesn’t it?

Whose head is filled with more nonsense than a ‘believers’?

Not exactly a rewarding task but somebody needs to set the score straight or you’ll all falsely believe that anarchy is a bad thing and, worse, that capitalism is a ‘good thing!’

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Cracked skulls

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are down…it appears they have run out of (fabricated) ‘good news’. Um despite markets being down oil is back over $100 a barrel and we can only wonder what this portends.

I’d opine this will be part of the ‘bag of tricks’ they’re holding in reserve for when the grand jury starts inquiring about, er, ‘irregularities’.

Which is to say we are NOT running out of oil (yet), we have merely exhausted the easy to reach and refine stuff.

The ‘problem’ we are facing is the exponentially increasing number of ‘end-users’, in that respect the oil that remains will not last long.

So the price increases we have seen are, at the moment, more indicative of the added expense to refine than of a supply shortage.

Shift mental gears with me as we explore the machinations of the guilty as they lose there struggle to avoid prosecution.

Often times I use the link provided by CKM but it was his commentary that inspired my selection of today’s piece. (The bullet titled ‘Borrowed’)

I wanted to provide credit where (to me) credit is truly due.

Borrowed: Here's a middle of the road set of predictions for 2012's economic, political and social adventures. Pessimism abounds. And that's among the optimists. I'd only add that things can appear deceptively close. Social upheaval may take some time. Wall Street bankers and their European cousins can kick the can a few more times before we all end up in the gutter. All the bad stuff will probably happen ,just not as quickly as some expect.

As you can observe, it is the last line that catches your attention.

Why haven’t half of the ‘bad things’ that are going to happen not happened yet?

In some cases the answer is they have…but the event was successfully camouflaged by the corporate owned media, in other cases we can only assume the public hasn’t gotten riled up enough to go head to head with the authorities.

But, as CK opines, the bad stuff WILL happen…just not as soon as you think…and by the time they ADMIT a majority of the general public no longer supports the current government…but the corporate owned media will continue to downplay this aspect of what, by then, will be open revolt.

Anyway, unmentioned by CKM is the ‘being held in reserve’ aspect of many of the trauma’s the criminals intend to inflict upon a stunned public.

Worse, if public outrage erupts in, er, ‘impromptu executions’ the criminals may ‘pull the trigger’ early to buy themselves more ‘run away time’.

Now, if you don’t think they have any ammo, think again!

These shiftless bastards have the power (and, in my opinion, the intent) to scuttle the entire global banking system on a moments notice.

Now turn your thoughts toward the dimwits YOU report to…

Not exactly your ’outside the box’ thinkers, are they?

Worse, they most often can be found clinging to the box, muttering the instructions to themselves like that alone would somehow correct the problem all by itself.

This is what dooms us good citizen, suffering the incompetent to maintain their grip on power.

Once these people find themselves on their own they will keep doing what they’ve always done, hoping against hope that it will (miraculously) work just one more time!

There’s a rather insidious reason why most command hierarchies are packed with incompetents, it is done to insure AGAINST ‘independent action’…

In fact they PREFER people who call to verify EVERYTHING before they commit to anything. It may be annoying BUT it dramatically reduces ‘unpleasant surprises’.

It also serves the useful purpose of guaranteeing total chaos once the information flow these ‘stuffed shirts’ are so reliant on ceases.

What’s that? You have a ‘competent boss’?

How much ‘latitude’ does he have in the decision-making process? Usually the competent are relegated to jobs where their latitude is very limited.

He may enjoy ‘total control’ over his immediate workforce and he also has the freedom to execute assignments as he sees fit…but he probably doesn’t have ‘budget autonomy’, he’s told what he can spend, when…and on what.

Likewise, he knows just how far he can fudge his expense report. It may ‘Look Like’ he’s running his own show but the reality is he’s on a ‘short leash’.

When the bastards ‘pull the trigger’ guys with enough moxie to make decisions on their own will be ‘dismissed’ without notice…or severance for that matter.

Which is to point out that the situation will be mighty desperate by then, almost every light post will have a criminal swinging from it.

And it won’t be a big stretch to connect the missing order givers from the resultant chaos…but it is a necessary evil, a purge that MUST happen.

Which only goes to show you that there ain’t no ‘peaceful’ (or easy) way to remake a civilization.

Shamefully, I have to admit that in order to remake the world, cracking a few skulls is unavoidable!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Clearance Sale!

Greetings good citizen,

It appears the market tickers are out of whack (but how do we tell?) They had the date right but the clock indicated it was already 2:35 in the afternoon! (and this was before the open!)

But that is not today’s topic, today’s offering comes to us straight from the headlines of today’s NY Times

Naturally, whenever you see a ‘this isn’t new or news’ item, we are compelled to ask why this and why now?

Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.

Congress has never been a place for paupers. From plantation owners in the pre-Civil War era to industrialists in the early 1900s to ex-Wall Street financiers and Internet executives today, it has long been populated with the rich, including scions of families like the Guggenheims, Hearsts, Kennedys and Rockefellers.

But rarely has the divide appeared so wide, or the public contrast so stark, between lawmakers and those they represent.

Well, ‘the divide‘, which has been growing steadily for the past few decades, has become more stark partly because the rich have indeed been getting richer and mostly because the poor have been getting considerably poorer.

Worse, the ‘bar’ for entry into the, er, ‘public arena’ has also risen at an alarming rate. The merely ‘well-to-do’ can no longer, er, ‘afford’ to mount a campaign, much less buy a seat on an influential committee if elected!

Politics have indeed long been the preserve of the ‘idle rich’.

Thus has ‘leadership’ been lacking for so long.

To give you an idea of how bad it has gotten good citizen, Connecticut has long enjoyed the status of having the highest per capita income of any state in the nation…but not anymore.

Recently it has come to light that there is a place where the per capita income dwarfs that of Connecticut…but it’s not a state!

So this, er, disparity may have existed for quite some time…

Can you guess which, er, ‘district’ has snatched the crown from Connecticut, home of hedge fund Billionaires and other Wall Street tycoons?

Correct good citizen, the enchanted district that contains ‘K Street’ has snatched the crown from the desert state of Connecticut.

What Connecticut isn’t in a desert?

The fuck it ain’t!

The biggest employer in the state is Stop & Shop!

Not that the rich give a shit about that! They don’t do their own grocery shopping…

Unlike the vast majority of us…although these days, more and more of us are purchasing our necessities from the local dollar store!

Makes you wonder what places like Stop & Shop are going to do when we are all reduced to buying pet food with our food stamps?

But it stands to reason that we’ll all have bigger things to worry about if it comes to that.

So, we have rich politicians AND a ‘leaderless’ world…how the fuck did that happen?

Aren’t the wealthy ‘natural leaders’?

Apparently not.

Doing what’s good for you often involves doing what’s not so good for a bunch of other people…but you aren’t gonna stay rich if you aren’t willing to, er, ‘crack a few skulls, I mean eggs!

So we return to the very limited pool our politicians are drawn from. Sure, on occasion some rich bastard will stake a poor man’s run for office but this is done as a ‘spoiler’, it is not done out of any sense of civic pride or a genuine desire for ‘honest government’ (despite robust claims to the contrary.)

It might fairly be said that the current incumbent is a fair example of this ‘spoiler’ in action. Give the public what they want but then tie his hands behind his back once he’s in office!

This tactic has made the public wary of what is now viewed as a ‘puppet government’, the ballot box has never been more suspect than it is today.

Which returns us to our original question…why point to corrupt politicians now?

Are they trying to focus our attention on the futility of changing anything while politicians and the system used to elect them are on sale cheap?

Or are they attempting to ‘deflect’ some of the hostility currently aimed at the financial community by pointing at their ‘enablers’?

There can be no doubt that our legislators are just as guilty as the finance boys…who are just as guilty as those who employ them!

Which only re-enforces my cry that we need to redefine the term criminal.

Justice disappears when criminals get to decide what is and what isn’t ‘just’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

War Declared!

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while you end up doing a ‘me too’ story but, naturally, nobody will write this article from my ‘point of view’.

So buckle up good citizen We’re going in!

Indefinite detention will now be law, not some emergency measure that history will judge to have been a mistake made in a crisis. It is a well thought out codification of certain views that have become commonplace in American society --- that "terrorists" (to be defined by whomever sits in the White House) are not to be allowed the due process allowed to other human beings because our government just *knows* they are so dangerous we cannot even take the chance that they won't be found guilty. That turns the rule of law on its head.

Digby provides us with a rather poignant snapshot of the nearly ten years Jose Padilla has been, er, ‘entombed’ by an unaccountable military/government.

Left to our imagination is the question of ‘what if they decided to, er, exterminate you, would they need anyone’s approval?’

Hell, would they even be required to TELL anyone?

Understand good citizen, your so-called ‘representatives’ are going to vote on this ’bipartisan’ piece of garbage without ever consulting you…and the abomination currently occupying the White House has already refused to veto this vile legislation that will allow bureaucrats the power to instantly create ‘non-persons’.

Not only is this a clear ‘declaration of war’ against the citizens of the US, these idiots just declared war on the bulk of mankind!

We can only take comfort in the fact that the punishment will fit the crime…

But not until millions suffer ‘indeterminate detention’ without even know what they’ve been accused of or by whom.

No irony should be lost on the fact that this is how ‘ancient royalty’ conducted business.

Does this mean we will we soon be ‘treated’ to the return of ‘courtly behavior’ (at the behest of a few barely closeted ‘royal wannabes’?)

Narcissism IS a psychiatric condition good citizen, largely due to the destructive tendencies it fosters within its victims.

If only we were so lucky as to have that tendency confined to the victim pining away with a mirror in hand…but no! Often the opposite is true, it is the narcissist that wreaks revenge on those ‘not as beautiful’ as they are.

And how can we tell there’s a narcissist behind this plot? A Narcissist KNOWS they’re sick and that their ideas are not ‘socially acceptable’…thus do they cling to the ‘cloak of anonymity.’

So our last president was a ‘cheerleader’ and this one used to moonlight as a model…what does that say about either of them, psychologically speaking?

But that’s just the icing on the cake…the impetus behind this ‘imprison at will’ legislation is being driven by something even murkier, something that wants to break down the very foundations of society itself…

Mostly so they won’t be hunted down and exterminated themselves.

Which brings us full circle to the downside of playing with ‘Overton Windows’.

Are the criminals really trying to provoke an ‘overreaction’ in the public psyche with this kind of overreaching legislation?

More disturbingly, what ‘middle ground’ are they really shooting at?

Will it end up being a considerable lowering of the bar as far as who is or isn’t a ‘terrorist’ or are we more likely to end up with stiffer sentencing requirements for ‘terrorist linked’ activities?

Flipping this entire terrorist rock over good citizen we arrive face to face with the fact that our patriot forefathers were, in fact, ‘terrorists’ as far as the British monarchy was concerned.

Yez good citizen, one man’s ‘freedom fighter’ is another man’s terrorist!

Which rolls the clock back ten years when ‘the cheerleader’ started the ‘global war on terra’!

Which isn’t nearly as fucked up as our legislature voting (in our names) to go along with it!

More, er, ‘distressing’ is how, even with these facts in evidence, the so-called Democrats have not A.) withdrawn their endorsement from the incumbent or B.) chosen a challenger to run against him!

I mean WTF good citizen!

What the hell does it take?

They’ve already assaulted the citizens protesting government, er, ‘inaction’ against Wall Street across the nation.

How much you want to bet everybody ‘arrested’ in one of those protests will turn up on a list of terrorists once this evil legislation passes?

Our prisons are already overflowing….so much so that ‘real’ criminals are being released because the state (s) can’t ‘safely’ incarcerate them.

So where will they, er, ‘house’ these newly discovered ‘terrorists’?

Why in those brand, spankin’ new, ‘for profit’ Haliburton detention centers, of course!

Is it just me good citizen or is the Crazy Train starting to look downright ‘demented’?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Pushing the limit...

Greetings good citizen,

If we start off with garden variety ‘Happy Talk’ we would observe that (as usual) The NYSE is up 120 points on the latest` ‘plan’ to save the Euro-zone.

The thing that is confusing about all of this is investors repeated ‘failure to understand’ that NOBODY has (and only the ‘cheaper there’ has any hope of EVER coughing up enough dough) to ‘save’ the Euro-zone…so WTF is the stock market rising for?

Maybe they think they can ‘wish’ the money into existence…and, ultimately, that’s how it will go down (once our so-called leaders accept that they have no alternative but to follow Zimbabwe.)

Economics 101 good citizen; if you produce no wealth you will soon not possess any!

The Western World has ‘off-shored’ (effectively) All of its ‘productive capacity’, which is its ‘ability’ to generate wealth.

It is important to keep in mind that ‘money’ (commonly referred to as the ‘yardstick’ used to ‘measure’ wealth) SHOULD NEVER BE CONFUSED with actual useful goods!

Mother Nature HAS NO CASH REGISTER so ‘wealth’ (useful items crafted from ‘free’ inputs) rely SOLELY on the ability to produce them…money is a total ‘non-factor’.

IF you do NOT possess the ability/equipment to produce a thing for yourself then you are obliged to EITHER surrender something of value for it OR learn to live without that item.

This is pretty basic stuff so I find it incredible that our politicians continue to pretend it’s not happening.

Worse, nothing is getting ‘better’ BECAUSE these nitwits have been ignoring the true problem for more than four years now! (Actually closer to four DECADES…)

Ironically, the pretty much ‘defunct’ OWS movement means they can no longer ‘safely’ continue to do so

Apparently, what I took for a ‘non-starter’ turned out to be something our criminal legislators eagerly embraced:

Last night Jon Stewart took on the recent passage of a bill that would allow the U.S. government to lock up American citizens indefinitely, without a trial. Troubling much? Even worse, Congress openly debated the subject for only an hour, and a mere 7 Congress people voted against it.

It seems to me our ‘representatives’ are more interested in saving their own ass (from being dragged to the gallows) than in protecting the basic rights of those they supposedly ‘represent’.

Conversely, if we simply ask the question of ‘why are they doing this?’ (without debating the political implications,) we could speculate that this is the ‘obvious next step’ in a non-violent ’usurpation’ of our former government.

I would ’opine’ that this legislation targets the ’troublemakers’ (like my humble self.) If I were to be honest then I’d say there’s enough ’evidence’ in these pages for them to (attempt) to scoop me up and lock me away…permanently.

Which is to say that I hope to evade capture; whether I will succeed remains to be seen. (It is just chilling to me to see an unexplained provision of the Patriot Act revealed to be exactly what it looked like! Haliburton contracts to build ‘detention centers’ within the continental US.)

But I ‘predicted’ when that ‘mysterious’ and as yet unexplained provision of the Patriot Act appeared that we should keep our eyes open for the ‘sudden disappearance’ of those ‘critical’ of the present political situation.

And I would be one of those, er, ‘troublemakers’.

Um, so now it looks like I’m going to get to see if I was right.

Not that I’m gonna hold my breath (or my tongue/keyboard hand) waiting for it.

Perhaps that recent spike in web activity was something other than what I took it to be…

Again, no point in fretting about it, Que sera-sera.

Just a reminder that you might not have the opportunity to download your personal copy of A Simple Plan in the not too distant future.

Just weird how this paranoia thing feeds on itself…but then again there really isn’t any such thing as being ‘too careful’.

I’m ‘guessing’ this legislation hasn’t passed the House yet nor has it gone for a presidential signature…and MAYBE it won’t make it.

BUT, they CAN NOT ‘drag their feet’ much longer.

If they intend to ‘take over’ their ‘window of opportunity’ is closing rapidly.

Although I am still of the opinion that they are favoring a ‘post collapse’ rescue strategy.

Theoretically, the populace will be more ‘open to new ideas’ after spending a few months swimming in their own cesspool.

There’s nothing like a few months of absolute horror to make monarchy sound like a ‘good idea’.

Hell, the new boss can call himself The Messiah if he wants to (so long as he can deliver the goods!)

How pathetic is it that the only one who will consistently ‘get the goods’ is the one offering to ‘rescue’ you (in exchange for everything you hold dear.)

Definitely a case of ‘more than you bargained’ for with ‘more for me’ monarchy.

Oddly, some adore monarchy for the ‘pomp and circumstance’ alone regardless of the cost…

But it takes all types…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The pursuit of Liberty

Greetings good citizen,

If you’re gonna tangle with John Law, ‘enmasse’, it is, er foolish to expect speedy service much less ‘gentle handling.’

Mass arrests present logistics not easily overcome…which is to opine that we’d all find it much more disturbing if they were ‘well-prepared’ to process several hundred ‘detainees’... swiftly.

So, good citizen, what were the protestors ‘expecting’?

 I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.

The bus that I was shoved into didn’t move for at least an hour. The whole time we listened to the screams and crying from a young woman whom the cops locked into a tiny cage at the front of the bus. She was in agony, begging and pleading for one of the policemen to loosen her plastic handcuffs. A police officer sat a couple of feet away the entire time that she screamed–but wouldn’t lift a finger.

Everyone on my bus felt her pain–literally felt it. That’s because the zip-tie handcuffs they use—like the ones you see on Iraq prisoners in Abu Ghraib—cut off your circulation and wedge deep through your skin, where they can do some serious nerve damage, if that’s the point. And it did seem to be the point. A couple of guys around me were writhing in agony in their hard plastic seats, hands handcuffed behind their back.

Most of us don’t make it a habit of getting thrown in the pokey thus most of us have no freaking clue what constitutes ‘normal’ in the local lock-up.

From the writer’s perspective these abuses are indeed horrible…but, in defense of the men with badges, there weren’t any ‘alternatives’.

Once cuffed you remain cuffed until you are either released or inserted into a ‘holding area’…which also sports a ‘communal commode’ (again, for security reasons.)

Um, while being forced to wet oneself is regrettable, imagine the logistics of having to cycle hundreds of desperate people through a ‘rest-room break’.

The ties used as ‘substitute’ handcuffs aren’t ‘reusable’…and trying to put new ones back on someone with already sore wrists is likely to be ‘challenging’ to say the least.

There’s something about pinning someone’s hands behind their back for hours that makes them a lot less ‘peaceful’.

Would it have been ‘more humane’ to seal the encampment, bring in ‘handy-huts’ and, er, ‘process’ the protesters ‘in place’? Definitely…but that would require thinking, something that’s legally prohibited in law enforcement!

Which is to point out that ‘the process’ isn’t supposed to be ‘humane’ or ‘quick and easy’ for that matter, the process is about ‘punishment’!

The ‘process-ees’ are being punished!

Don’t, er, ‘enjoy’ being humiliated? The solution is simple, don’t get busted!

The police aren’t equipped to (humanely) handle large numbers.

The ‘procedures’ they are bound to follow also weren’t intended to facilitate large numbers.

Crime is usually a rather lonely profession, even a ‘gang’ of bank robbers seldom numbers more than a half dozen.

Funny thing about technology, the money is no longer in the bank, the money is in the bank’s computer! Most banks don’t have enough cash on hand to throw a good party! A testament to how ‘credit driven’ our society has become.

While we still hear about banks being robbed, we also have a new show on TV called ‘America’s dumbest criminals.’

No irony should be lost on the fact that there will continue to be (attempted) bank robberies even after cash is outlawed! (Trick number one will be finding the bank!)

But I digress…

We can indeed be ‘thankful’ that the nation’s police departments ARE NOT equipped to handle large scale civil disobedience. What would it say about our civilization if they were?

Um, let us abandon the topic of police brutality and return to the more familiar territory of financial collapse.

Thanks to what can only be described as one of the worst cases of ‘irrational exuberance’ in recent memory, the stock markets posted their largest single week gain this week since 2008!

Which makes you wonder because the markets ‘started to tank’ in mid 2007...

Worse, the, er, ‘employment index’ posted its largest gain all year, coinciding with a nearly half a percentage point drop in the ‘national’ unemployment rate.

Yet the NYSE closed in negative territory…

Talk about your mixed messages, good citizen!

Like this message (because I’m going to ask you to ram it into reverse for a moment as we revisit our previous topic.

Your first amendment rights are only valuable on a proverbial ‘level’ playing field. Once the judiciary is corrupted the only thing ‘freedom of speech’ protects is the freedom to lie!

So, and understand that the, er, ‘police’ will be even less, er, ‘friendly’ when you do this, the time has come to defend/uphold your 2nd amendment rights.

Conversely (and just ‘opinionating’ here) it is likely that when this glove is dropped we will find a ‘good percentage’ of police ‘switching sides’.

It is time for us to stop this 1st amendment nonsense and begin the 2nd amendment, er, assault for our children’s liberty!

Liberty is freedom from ’tyranny’ (Tyranny is being bent to the will of another.)

Liberty should NEVER be the exclusive preserve of the privileged few.

Think about it.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Cat/Bag...Out?

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘overPRICED’ stock markets continue to sell off around the globe as the hopelessly corrupt financial system finally springs out of the proverbial bag

I say incurable. This is the diagnosis of an irreversible disease. The corruption and collapse of the rule of law, in the financial sphere, is basically irreparable. It’s not just that restoring trust takes a long time. It’s that under the new technological order in this field, it can not be done. The technologies are designed to sow and foster distrust and that is the consequence of using them. The recent experience proves this, it seems to me. And therefore there can be no return to the way things were before. In other words, we are at the end of the illusion of a market place in the financial sphere.

Well, how about it good citizen, can you say FUBAR? (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair)

Dunno if I read a different version of this speech yesterday but I recall Mr. Galbraith (or maybe it was someone else’s commentary) concluding with the opinion that things were so far gone the only option remaining to us was to start over again from scratch.

Or was that just me reading my own beliefs into the statement?

No, it wasn’t me.

(The version I read last night was posted on ‘naked capitalism’, this link leads to ‘firedoglake’.)

And the two ‘copies’ ARE different…for reasons unknown.

Anyway, it’s one thing for a nobody like myself to opine that the global financial system is hopelessly corrupt but quite another to have ‘people of note’ parrot the same viewpoint.

The question, naturally, is what does this improbable development mean?

It certainly, as Mr. Galbraith points out, not news so why admit it now?

Perhaps it is me who is missing the point, Mr. G has taken on the mantle of ‘contrarian’ and ‘truthsayer’ so the Corporate media may well just ignore his assertions.

I suspect the real ‘revelation’ here is that the ‘economics community’ is now on record as admitting they teach bullshit in exchange for a paycheck.

At least in Mr. Galbraith’s opinion…

Until someone like Mr. Bernanke comes out an accuses the financial community of fraud, Mr. Galbraith’s opinion will remain just that, an opinion.

The fact that the ‘rest of the world’ agrees with him will be of no consequence.

Until the hangings start, then all of a sudden it will be ‘everybody knew and nobody bitched then!’

Which is to point out that by the time we get around to restoring justice the guilty will be falling back on the ‘timeliness defense’.

It’s not particularly productive to note that the timeliness defense didn’t do the Nazis much good.

Neither does the ‘everybody else was doing it’ defense.

(Which will likely prove ‘problematic’ when the time comes but I guess what I’m saying is THAT time IS coming!)

What remains to be seen is who will be thrown to the wolves in the initial ‘mock’ trials and who gets it in the ‘real’ trials…

Don’t doubt it for a second good citizen there will be two phases separated by an interval where nothing happens (improves) after the first trial.

The difference being is nothing will change after the ‘dupes’ are sacrificed, it will only be after the guilty are brought to justice that a new system will be put in place.

The danger lies in a new ‘proposal’ that is almost indistinguishable from what currently exists. Sadly most of you are so ‘financially illiterate’ that you will be unable to distinguish genuine change from the ‘cosmetic’.

Just as most of you are unaware that the ‘financial innovations’ the won Alan Greenspan a Knighthood and that Larry Summers praises so highly are indistinguishable from COUNTERFEITING!

But hey, when you get that far out there, ‘reality’ is whatever I say it is…(say the so-called ‘Masters of the Universe’)

Naturally, they were ‘st-runk’ out of their minds when they stumbled upon this interesting (and considerably self-centered) point of view, which is still no excuse.

It is one thing to spout nonsense and quite another to defend it as both real and rational.

Which is to direct your attention to ‘center stage’ where both dominate a highly improbable scene.

Left to our collective imagination is whether or not the ‘majority opinion’ will hasten the collapse of our civilization?

Like Porter Stanisbury says, it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when?’

So what’s your poison, good citizen, whiskey or gunpowder?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Slick Willy

Greetings good citizen,

We’ve all had deep misgivings about the Roberts court but today’s top headline on the NY Times is being construed as ‘the end’ for class action lawsuits.

Not that this should surprise anybody who has been paying attention. If we admit we have a ‘captive government’ then it stands to reason the court is also ‘captive’ and neither is (or is expected to be) ‘responsive’ to the will of the governed.

Which brings us to the upcoming presidential election.

I’m still of a mind that we will witness something along the lines of a coup de tat stemming from the ‘impasse’ over the debt ceiling.

But supposing that doesn’t happen the ‘opposition’ as yet has no viable candidate to run against the incumbent.

What is disturbing about this is the conservatives, while continuing to ‘bash’ the sitting president, DON’T feel the need to run against him.

It doesn’t matter who you ‘elect’ to public office if that individual takes his/her marching orders from the same set of assholes who told the last guy what to do.

How sad is it good citizen that Obamarama is now being considered one of the best GOP presidents ever?

Slick Willy (the welfare slayer) still has my vote for Best GOP president ever, just as St. Ronnie is still holding on to his ‘first place’ as Worst President ever (as bad as W. was Reagan was worse!)

Sort of exemplifies the duration of our ‘crisis of leadership’ going back to the LBJ/Nixon years.

There hasn’t been a Democratic candidate worth voting for since LBJ refused re-election in 1968.

They’ve all sucked; the only saving grace has been that the Republican candidates sucked worse! (Something they promptly prove as soon as they win office.)

Step one was ‘rigged’ elections (via the media) step two will be the ‘default’ of our democracy, sparked in part by frustration caused by years of ‘ineffective’ government.

The battle cry will be ‘time for action’ by the very people responsible for thwarting democratic processes to resolve issues.

Understand that this will be the old ‘my way or the highway’ we have all grown accustomed to from our capitalist employers.

Their, er, ‘radical’ policies to liberate the markets and let them (finally) work their magic will, as you can imagine, result in multiple disasters.

Which is to admonish you that you CAN’T ALLOW people who honestly think ‘the one with the most toys in the end wins’ control the economy!

That sort of ‘non-thinking’ leads to this sort of bull shit!

Which, naturally, brings us full circle with the desperate acts of desperate people. And these are acts happening right here and now!

I acknowledge these are not ‘new’, there are whole swaths of the economic desert that have been ‘scrapped’ by the ‘opportunists’ among us. (Ironically, the same mindset that brought us ‘Flipper the Slumlord’!)

While the article doesn’t offer dates, I suspect most of these incidents are recent, indicative of an increasingly restless population, simmering in the jobless summer heat.

When I say ‘coup’ and ‘radical’ I mean we are talking the return of ‘debt slavery’.

The local pig farm can ‘buy’ you for pennies on the dollar and force you to work off the full face value of your debt for an unlivable wage.

There will be no ‘additional charge’ for beating you and if they beat you to death it won’t be their problem but yours!

And the loony-toon conservatives will call this ‘justice’.

How these idiots think society will remain cohesive once tyranny becomes omnipresent tends to strain the imagination.

Which is to remind you that time, like resources, cannot be set to ‘infinite’.

We don’t have ‘forever’ to work things out.

Nor will we be able to keep trying until we ‘get it right’ (resource limitations will enforce those restrictions…how sad is it that determining what limitations are genuine and which ones are imaginary/economically driven will become our greatest challenge?)

We really do need to alter how and why we do what we do…or this is going to end in tears as our situation becomes hopeless.

Um, we may not live to see that day personally but that doesn’t mean its not coming.

Apparently most of you are cool with the idea that your grandchildren will curse your name for not acting when you had the chance.

And believe it or not, chances have never been better!

YOU need to act NOW, before the simple-minded seize control and it’s too late!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner