Chuckleheads

Greetings good citizen,

For the massive size of yesterday’s rally, today’s ticker indicates the Dow only added 20 points for the week.

However, if you look at the chart you would see that yesterday’s rally merely restored what the market had sold off the previous day.

Leaving us with the uncomfortable knowledge that theft is theft and the ‘paper rich’ have been robbing us blind via their control of the stock markets.

Which brings us to a much more vexing problem: But it’s only vexing if you think something should be done about it…and apparently most people don’t or worse, don’t know what to do about it.

And what problem is that? It’s finding yourself being held in a dungeon with no means of escape, never mind rescue.

The ‘dungeon’ is your life and YOU have lost all control over it.

This November they are going to dangle the keys to the dungeon in front of you but you already know one of the two, er, ‘candidates’ won’t lift a finger to help you. He’s been in a position to set you free for the last four years but so far the only thing he has succeeded in doing is sit on his thumb.

But wait! listen to ‘chucklehead’ make his case on why YOU should vote for someone you already know isn’t going to do Jack for you!

Instead of doing something practical to mitigate the harm that the U.S. does in the world – by voting for the person who might be less likely to overuse the U.S. military or who might restrain the emission of greenhouse gases – these folks sit on the sidelines basking in their perfection. They won’t make a call.

The hard decision is to support the imperfect candidate who has a real chance to win and who surely will do some rotten things but likely fewer rotten things than the other guy – and might even make some improvements.

I know that doesn’t “feel” as satisfying. One has to enter a morally ambiguous world. But that it is the world where many innocent people can be saved from horrible deaths (though not all) and where possibly actions can be taken to ensure that future generations are left a planet that is still habitable or at least with the worst effects of global warming avoided.

Um, I’d start by pointing out the people calling themselves ‘progressives’ MOST DEFINITELY ARE NOT in any way, shape or form Democrats.

The democrats are GONE, they no longer exist…which is to point out the obvious, the vast majority of us don’t even have a horse in the upcoming presidential election.

The whole electoral process has been hijacked by the >One Percent. There are NO ‘honest brokers’ in this contest.

And understand good citizen, governments are formed with the ‘EXPRESS PURPOSE’ of protecting the public from the predations of the Rich!

So what do you do…or more succinctly, who do you vote for when nobody in the race represents you?

Chucklehead says you should vote for the one who will do ‘the least harm’.

Makes you wonder if that was his thinking when W. was running for a second term?

Which all the proof you’ll ever need that the electoral process is corrupt beyond repair!

The fact that W. got a second term in defiance of all logic proves the electoral process is corrupt and in the control of the >One Percent!

What do you do when the government no longer protects your interests?

The >One Percent knew what to do, they ‘bought’ the government.

The question is how do we rid ourselves of a corrupt government?

Can we ‘vote them out?’

Can’t, the >One Percent owns the ballot box (actually they own who reports the election results…so it doesn’t matter who or what you vote for because the reporters are going to report whatever they guy who cuts their paycheck tells them to report!

And it IS ‘that damn simple!’

Because there is NO WAY you can prove that ISN’T what happens!

So are we ‘stuck’…are we doomed to be shackled under an unresponsive government?

Now you have to ask yourself if you want to live on you knees for the rest of your natural days.

And most of you are thinking, ‘if this is living on my knees then I don’t have it too bad.’

Even though, comparatively speaking, you live like an animal compared to the >One Percent.

Still, life on your knees is preferable to dying in just about any position…and you’re willing to put up with the ‘occasional frisking’ if that’s as bad as it gets.

But you already know it isn’t going to stop with friskings and being hassled about what you’re up to and why you’re outside. It will be the ‘disappearings’ that are going to eat you alive.

When people you know start vanishing and you know that they got picked up by the cops, then is when you’ll start wondering, ‘will I be next’?

The time to put your foot down is BEFORE ‘the disappearings’ start…try to organize resistance AFTER they start and you’re probably gonna get it.

So, good citizen, who do you think you’ll be voting for this November, Mr. Sat-on-his-thumb for four years or Mr. One Percent, who really only wants to be in the history books?

Not a real ‘inspiring’ set of choices, are they?

I wonder who the Socialists are running this November?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Progressives

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets continue to rally for no apparent reason but considering the rampant fraud in the financial markets maybe this is a case of ‘getting while the getting is good’…

Because one need not be a genius to see that there will soon not be any financial markets, anywhere.

And yes Virginia, it will be ‘fallout’ from the collapse of the global banking network.

Um, it staggers the mind to consider what life will be like in the hours after they drop that particular WMD?

But wait! Our ‘saviors’ in the in the ‘progressive party’ want us to turn off our computers because they are making us ‘depressed’.

(Sadly, thinking has a way of doing that.)

To stay sane, Americans just might have to return to a 40-hr work week and ditch our screwed-up attachment to E-mail. According to a new study, spending too much time on the internet is disastrous for your mental health.

From CBS Charlotte:

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg recently studied more than 4,100 Swedish men and women between the ages of 20 and 24 for a year and found that a majority of them who constantly use a computer and mobile phones can develop stress, sleeping disorders and depression.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is about as ‘out of context’ as you can get but the headline for this article reads ‘Get off the computer, it may be making you depressed!’

Not study shows, not the pressure of being available 24/7, just ‘get off the computer!’

WTF!

Most people will never read that article but almost everyone will skim that headline…

How did CK phrase it the other day? Incompetence is not a diagnosis--it’s a verdict!

Let’s parse this one just a teeny-tiny bot more, shall we? They conduct a study during one of the worst economic downturns IN HISTORY and arrive at the conclusion that some of the people in this study were ‘depressed’…

How fucking remarkable is that?

More remarkable, perhaps is the number of people who buy into the conservative meme that social contracts are no longer valid!

Recent events trace a threatening trajectory, sufficiently so that it may be worthwhile to look ahead a few generations to the millennium anniversary of one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights: the issuance of Magna Carta, the charter of English liberties imposed on King John in 1215.

The first scholarly edition of the Magna Carta was published in 1759 by the English jurist William Blackstone, whose work was a source for U.S. constitutional law. It was entitled “The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest,” following earlier practice. Both charters are highly significant today.

The first, the Charter of Liberties, is widely recognized to be the cornerstone of the fundamental rights of the English-speaking peoples – or as Winston Churchill put it more expansively, “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.”

Let us parse Mr. Chomsky’s last comment because I have already told you about the affirmed conservative position on social contracts.

Both charters are indeed ‘highly significant’ if you want to live in a ‘civil society’.

Without a ‘social contract’ civil society is impossible…or at the very least disturbingly inconsistent.

The adhesive in a ‘non-contract society’ is fear. You live day by day doing your utmost to not be the one who pisses-off the nominal ‘head of the table’ of the day.

And I do indeed mean ‘of the day’.

Usually, the biggest and the meanest have SOME staying power (and contrary to popular belief, not everyone WANTS to be ‘king’.)

In fact the ‘head oaf’ is usually a bit of an enigma. He has a bigger and stronger rival who bosses him around behind everyone else’s back but the obvious leader let’s the Oaf wear the crown.

This is a way of protecting oneself against (stupid) rivals.

And mind you, this does absolutely nothing for the ‘average individual’. The Oaf is too stupid to care about the common man and his ersatz ‘handler’ can’t do more than suggest what the Oaf should do…and if things go poorly, he once again has the oaf for cover.

Understand what it means to live in a world without a ‘social contract’. It is Darwinism taken to the extreme.

You, right here and now in fact, would be wise to KILL everyone you see before they get an eyeball on YOU…because when they see you it is in their ‘best interests’ to kill you too.

That is life under the ‘no social contract’ mandate.

This is NOT the first time the human social contract has come under attack, nor will it be the last.

It is regularly shredded by governments of both sides during armed conflicts but it is not just governments who 'disavow' the basic human social contract, movements and whole ideologies have sprung up around the notion that there is ‘no such thing’ as a ‘human social contract’.

I also hope I don’t need to remind you that during the last global economic recession, the people who called themselves ‘progressives’ had another name…

A name that is now ‘infamous’…they called themselves Nazis.

How ironic to see the Nazi inspired Libertarians calling themselves ‘progressives’ again?

Oh, PS, by the way…guess who ISN’T defending the human social contract?

You got it! (The progressives!)

Any questions?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

What's Normal?

Greetings good citizen,

The destruction of our civilization proceeds both on schedule and as planned.

Increasingly, the ‘progressives’, the heirs apparent to the now defunct Democrats, have been displaying their ‘centrist’ credentials.

Which gives the rest of us a nauseatingly small amount of room for disagreement with ‘Conservative Dogma’.

Eliminate the opposition good citizen and the only thing that remains is the isolated people who ‘disagree’ with mainstream dogma…

How fucking sick is it good citizen that most people falsely believe ‘The Progressives’ have their backs? when every mainstream political movement has ‘sold out’ to the corporatocracy!

Why Going 'Back To Normal' Is No Longer An Option for the American Economy -- And Where We're Headed Now

Stop waiting around, because "normal" as we know it isn't coming back. [snip]

Other theorists, including Gar Alperovitz, Jeffery Sachs and Umair Haque, agree that there’s a phase shift happening under our feet — but they believe the real shift lies in the changing structure of capitalism itself. Forming markets is a core human activity that we’re not any more likely to abandon than eating or breathing. But our understanding of the purpose and value of markets — and the role of capital within them — is overdue for a profound change. Haque argues that “twentieth-century capitalism’s cornerstones shift costs to and borrow benefits from people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations." But, he continues, "both cost shifting and benefit borrowing are forms of economic harm that are unfair, non-consensual, and often irreversible.” The result is a great imbalance that we are finally being forced to fully reckon with, one that will call us to radically change our focus, creating a totally new kind of capitalism.

Haque makes a distinction between “thin” and “thick” value. Things with “thin” value tend to be artificial, unsustainable, and meaningless to anyone but the people who produce and consume them. Hummers, McMansions and Big Macs are all examples of thin value items. They’re produced without any recognition of our larger values context or the externalized costs to the community, and consuming them tends to add to the overall imbalance in our economy. Thin value, he writes, is “profit that is in many ways a financial fiction, because it fails to exceed a fuller, truer economic cost of capital.” And the phase shift is evident in the fact that the companies that are falling hardest right now are the ones whose past profits have relied most heavily on monetizing our common wealth for private profit.

“Thick” value — produced by companies that practice “constructive capitalism” — is value that is sustainable, that has a moral component that matters, and that multiplies itself. Companies that practice it tend to win because they produce things that have a deeper meaning to people. Their real wealth isn’t what they’re able to extract from the rest of us, but in their long, deep, trusting relationships with their customers. The world is shifting from the economics of a game reserve to those of an ark, says Haque. The companies that are thriving now are the ones that increasing their focus on “constructive advantage” — “how free a company is of deep debt to people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations.” While this focus-shift is far from complete, the current economy abounds with firms that are showing us a new way forward. (Apple is a prime example of a company that creates “thick value,” [Seriously?] but we’ve seen recently that its commitment to this ideal has some rather glaring thin spots.)

WTF, Good citizen!

How screwed up is it that the only ‘acceptable’ political solution to our crippled economy MUST center on ‘for profit’ capitalism?

What does it tell you about their dogma when the only ones who support it are from relative ‘newcomers’ to predatory capitalism (or the brainwashed and clueless children of the one percent?)

This mirrors the recent attempts to ‘print our way to prosperity’ (which is working about as well as it did(n’t) in Zimbabwe!

‘Responsible Capitalism’ is an oxymoron! (Especially when capitalism provides the vehicle with which to ‘buy off’ regulatory oversight!)

How pathetic is it good citizen that ALL mainstream political movements have ‘sold out’ to the corporatocracy for access to the funding necessary to mount a campaign!

When there is only one source of political funding…(and let’s not have any lies between us, good citizen, there is only one source!) Politics becomes a one note song!

Maybe we are confronted with the same ‘fatal myopia’ that eventually sunk the Greek Empire, the one where their oligarchic leadership was ‘incapable’ of even conceiving of a society that wasn’t dependent on slavery.

Well, don’t look now but slavery is back…and it’s growing.

What will you do when the ONLY way you will be able to ‘legally’ support your family will be by literally selling yourself in exchange for ‘regular’ meals and habitation and management will decide what constitutes the definition of both ‘fit’ and ‘sufficient’.

Oh, and don’t forget the ‘health’ clause…get sick and your on your own. The whole arrangement rests upon your continued good health!

Because there’s a couple of million other poor slobs just waiting in line to take your place!

Welcome to the future, good citizen!

I doubt many of us will ‘tolerate’ that kind of treatment for very long…

But that’s just my opinion, it’s up to YOU to prove me right!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner