The Future

Ahh, the heady days of the early internet after the government sold it off. A future of unheralded peace and prosperity due to the democratization of knowledge and ease of commerce. Well then, looking at some of the results. Millions of people obsessively looking at fake news and pictures of each other doing stupid things while ignoring everything around them. Millions looking at the ubiquitous porn. Whole communities that believe the moon landings were faked, or they were abused as part of an alien conspiracy and they can now use telepathy and remote viewing, or that vaccinations kill people. The efficiency of commerce now includes virtual slave labor for millions in southern China, while over-worked Americans toil in warehouses at breakneck pace to ensure some slack-jawed yokel in Tuscaloosa can get a talking fish and some fake penis enlargement pills to be delivered by yet more overworked and underpaid shipping company workers while actual stores shutter. Oh, and the spreading of democracy, where, under the greatest private and public surveillance yet, we have elected an openly racist and vindictive failed casino builder and television host who now wishes to appoint a neo-confederate, authoritarian lunatic to the post of Attorney General. My tattooed, ear-ringed friend said this in 1989 as he watched my brother experiment with sending a stick figure image across a 2500 baud modem on a 12mhz desktop.."Yup...and when things get faster, they'll send smut over it." That statement understood human nature better than all the techno-utopians. The tools are only as good as the talking monkeys operating the things, and there are a lot of really dumbass talking monkeys.

Did you get your precious photos?

“The problem with Americans is they have no culture” Barry F ca. 1988

I don’t know why my friend said this.  I can’t remember the discussion or the context, much less the day. But I do remember him saying those very profound words. He is perhaps the most American person I know. Originally from Indiana, his family moved around as his father sought jobs, much like the rest of the U.S. and World population. He is a Navy veteran, and wears this proudly. He is also much decorated with tattoos, and until age struck him with joint problems, was also an artist, a skin illustrator, description courtesy of Rod Steiger. Decades before personal decorations entered mainstream culture, he had multiple piercings both seen and unseen (Yes, that body part) and tattoos everywhere. He enjoys his Harley, cheeseburgers and coffee. Despite his long hair and anti-social appearance, he was also perhaps the most normal behaving of my cohort, which at the time, in our twenties, consisted of ex-junkies trying to learn how to put on our pants. His house was at least clean and livable.

His observation is profound because it is very true. And, because it is true, it has allowed a culture to be implanted.

My title is from the movie Blade Runner, and is part of a conversation between two replicants, the genetically engineered biological slave subjects of the movie. They are part the emotionally important cache of memories for one of the characters that are either implanted within or generated by the replicants as they live their brief, engineered four-year lifespan.

In a way, many Americans are much like them. Most of us are not the descendants of Massachusetts Bay and its associated Boston Brahmans, but instead are the children of great crashing waves of desperate, landless, hungry peasants symbolic of famine driven diasporas left on the beaches as the waves recede. Our ancestors landed, dusted off the sand, and were too busy working and enjoying the idea they could actually own land and eat too worry. We do not know who the hell we are and how we got here, and our ancestors never had the time to remember and tell us, as they were too busy working. Here, they at least had a chance. They were not so hungry they had to chew on leather mitts, as my grandfather once described. The problem is with no ties to the land, implanted cultural memes of patriotism and no historical context, American’s can be sold any story. Chopping down Cherry trees, not telling lies, Cherokee Princesses, the belief that no one was here or god intends us to rule or evil communists or shining city on the hill, we can be told anything because we have no history. Or, at least one that is truly told.

It is erased. The Indigenous inhabitants didn’t exist or were primitive savages digging in the ground for roots, rather than the people who had complex societies who died from biological bad luck in the evolutionary viral sweepstakes. They were not the people who built Cahokia, designed the Serpent Mound, mined copper on the Keewenaw and traded it for shells from the Gulf of Mexico and somehow brought them to the Grand Mound on the Rainy River. They were, and are, the disappeared Injun of the “Trails End.”

As colonists with the ancestry of desperate peasants, we don’t have much to emotionally base our lives on. You see this when people investigate their genealogy. It is inevitably some Royalty from the Merovingian's or Tudor’s, rather than indentured servants named John. The same is true, for people feeling loss or guilt over how they got here, so they invent things such as the apocryphal Cherokee Princess who confessed on the deathbed to Indian heritage. Much laughed at, it should really be pitied. The tellers are often emotionally desperate people trying to belong to something in a world that has forced their ancestors to move every generation for 150 years.  Everyone needs a home, and we will invent one if needed.

Thus the myths.

As Noam Chomsky one clarified, you never hear of someone in Italy being called “ Anti-Italian” during a political discussion. Terms like that, such as “Anti-American”, are used only in places where all cultural life is subsumed to the Nation State, as in Totalitarian states.  This is a relatively new development. Culturally, this has endured in the U.S. since the propaganda project to politically move us into World War One, but up until Word War Two, people still questioned involvement in other countries, despite the constant invasion of danger zones such as Nicaragua and Mexico.  Eagles, the word “Freedom”, and the Military are just part of the precious photos we use, much like the replicants. They are our false memories, our implants, creating a cultural memory to justify our existence.The methods and symbols used are still the same, and Edward Bernays would be very proud.  

God forbid someone mention genocide. 

The True History of Violence.

In North Dakota, Local Dakota Natives and supporters are protesting a pipeline  being built through both North and South Dakota. Ignoring the hideous irony of both states being named by colonial settlers after people they forcibly removed from the east following a mass hanging, I will allow myself to continue using the names.  As the protest has grown with calls for support from the outside, the protest has not disappeared, as is likely government officials hoped for.

This Minnesota Public Radio headline reflects the Orwellian language of our colonial culture and modern capitalism: “Dakota Access Pipeline Protests in North Dakota turn violent.” Local officials complained that protesters violated public land; private “security companies” used attack dogs and pepper spray on the supposed invaders. The empty stupidity and arrogance of any Government official standing west of the Missouri River south of Bismarck and complaining of Natives “violating private land” should be met with derision and a public dunking. Any soul familiar with the history of the Fort Laramie Treaty would know this, but colonial cultures, especially one as arrogant as the immigrants to the United States, must erase history in order to justify their very presence. Genocide and land theft don’t match with flag waving and the “shining city on the hill.” The Dakotas are its very essence.

A true complaint and history of violence might include how colonial settlement was built on the violence of extraction for profit, beginning with the fur trade, the buffalo slaughter, the Forts, the Indian Agents, the forced settlement of the Dakota from Minnesota to what are now the Dakotas, the Black Hills gold rush, the mines, the Dawes Act, the importation of colonists via public subsidy of the railroads, the Homestead Act, the damming of the Missouri, the coal mines and now of course, the oil extraction.  None of these are mentioned, and of course if they are, the immediate response is to “Why do you bring up the past...all you do is complain!” That is the heart and soul of any colonial culture built on exploitation for profit…deliberate erasure of history.

The true history of violence links settlers very presence with exploitation. The workers, now best represented by oil boomers, pipeline workers and imported mercenaries renamed “security firms”, are merely well trained and indoctrinated servants of their corporate masters and their state enforcers. Most of them are merely desperate to make a living in Post-Reagan America, which is really America at its core, built on fraud, boom, bust and resource extraction.  The Bakken is just a pile of Buffalo bones heaped across the horizon disguised in moving metal. Afterall, America is real estate speculation started by European royalty until the locals wanted their cut.  As modern workers on the industrial frontier, the corporations are able to buy their allegiance as their profits are beyond avarice. Meth and Heroin have replaced alcohol for use in quieting the soul. And like much of the U.S. population, indoctrinated on flags, empty myths and psychological desperation to justify their own actions, the response to anyone interfering with their right to rev a truck is rage.

The mercenaries, who at this point should probably include most government officials who complain of the protestors, are servants of power and privilege. Most are amoral, self-serving psychopaths, the ordinary bureaucrats as in Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann. It is fitting the local sheriff has a German name, for his actions do imitate the Afrikaners, another colonial culture built on its own myths and a cultural history of nothing. Underneath their definitions and actions are the ignorance and myths of our history,  a history of land exploitation, of soil, of the fish and animals, of the Natives and of the immigrant colonists. The error lies in the colonist descendants, orphans of history and capitalism, their history erased much like the forced Native boarding school victims, not knowing just how they got here in both time and place. Someone has been telling them to wave the flag and forget who they are, and off they have gone for three generations. Their anger is desperation to keep up with the great debt cycle their masters impose on them, but without history they have no words. You cannot speak up if you don’t know the language. And that is what makes us human.

What frightens the government and the corporations is the Natives are restless, and now some of the Sepoys agree with them. They are terrified of Lucknow happening here, not in violence, but in political resistance. The security “companies” are the paid mercenaries of the exploitive state. They are the cavalry with different emblems. It may no longer be legal to kill us en masse, but they can enslave us or pay us, and still make a tidy profit.

It’s not about guns, it’s about money.

Someone is making a lot of money from people dying.

The mass murders and police killings of the last several years, despite the large overall drop in violent crime since the early 1990’s, are now part of competing political narratives. A world to be made safe from hordes of dark skinned lunatics, both native and foreign, endanger the Great White Bwana of America, or a chaotic maelstrom of random lunatics bent on destroying all that is good and holy; suburbia and the last bastions of whiteness, small city, town and rural America.  Coupling this with the official narrative of deranged desert lunatics who for no reason hate us, paranoia has matched heights of the cold war. Instead of Red Dawn Russians, we have Red Dawn North Koreans, a tale that would be hilarious if it wasn’t tied to a propaganda system preparing young people to die for the Empire of commercial gain. One has to search through academics, non-mainstream news sources and the odd foreign correspondent to find anything mentioning United States Foreign Policy, covert activity and military presence as possible causes. Our Saudi friend’s spread of Sunni fundamentalism, joined with our support and subsidy of the murderous Israeli State is never mentioned. After all, why would they hate us after dropping bombs on them or starving them into submission, not when all you want is to hand them democracy and McDonald’s?  The barbarians are here and the gate is breached. Beware sinners.

As most people act emotionally and not rationally, the reality of dropping violent crime rates for the past two decades has also seen an explosion in security systems and weapons for home defense. Fear is a greater motivator than rationality, and despite the lowering crime rates, the advertisements for home security systems and guns as home “defense” find a receptive audience, helped along with a 24-hour news cycle that can turn a traffic stop in Reno into a seeming nation threatening debacle.

“Back to live video…How many more of these grocery store purse snatchers might be tied with ISIS, Wolf?”

A hundred years ago, the first system of politically coercive propaganda was created to build popular support for the United States to enter World War 1. Largely forgotten, the basic infrastructure we see now,  advertising, spokespeople, paramilitary enforcement and surveillance developed as means to push the United States into a war a large part of the populace did not want. Wilson’s “making the world safe for democracy” required authoritarian means. Out of this came Edward Bernays, who, modifying and improving the methods, fully developed social manipulation and public relations by making the world safe for women to smoke. Ignoring the decades since then, when the methods were simply studied and refined, network technology has simply made this easier. Psychologists, social network researchers and advertisers now access a mass propaganda system with real time testing. 

A researcher for a gun company can now learn how his major audience, largely working class white males with poor family relationships and poor relations with fathers, can have their insecurity manipulated into a need for authoritarianism and guns. Insecure emotionally and from a young age  raised on a propaganda diet of manhood via military means, authoritarianism provides the needed warmth of security and this group is easily coerced into an obsessive need for weapons. What has made it worse is the social instability extreme capitalism has wrought. Whole communities destroyed, family relationships torn apart by either disappearing income or the need to move to survive, the fear is real. Despite the wealth, suburbia is not community; it is an artifice resembling community based on commodification of community. And with fear comes anger. This, the remains of human community left in the U.S., is an audience ready made for weapon’s sales. Mix in a propaganda culture of manhood by violence and militarism, you will likely have what we have now. While everyone yells and screams about guns as inanimate objects and/or responsibility, the central question is lost. Does everyone, from socially awkward mentally ill people to random women having a gun make us all safer, or does it simply add better death machines to all the insanity and rage constantly floating around in a society 40 years into the neo-liberal project of privatizing the earth and society for the benefit of the wealthy?

The Gun and weapon manufacturers have succeeded in their aim. Their product is now the answer to all our problems. They have managed to join and help create a propaganda stream of fear and paranoia where their product, nothing more than a simple to operate but albeit messy death machine, is the solution for everyone. Police, ordinary citizen, ordinary housewife, oppressed minority or just plain old whackjob, they have the solution or you. The bigger the better, which in reality is kill more faster. That is all that guns do and are for. This is the world they wanted, and they could ask for no better advertising then mass slaughter. How else will you defend yourself against our product than by having one yourself?

The United States of Fear and Death, brought to you by the NRA and the gun manufacturers. 

Class in America

Working in delivery has only one gift...you see the effect of class. The world, divided into zip codes of wealth and poverty, the gated and ungated country juxtaposed to the closed city. The lake areas are the worst, with many now the expensive year round homes of the retired. Producing nothing, these aged Lamprey  have attached themselves to the ship of imagination called money, the law having given them this right over the currently working for a pittance. One has the urge to drive the truck through the home and tossing the online ordered, overly priced wine out the window, never acknowledging you have replaced it with antifreeze. Wall Street Journal wines is now ol' death by grapes. Unlike my coworkers, I'm not enthralled with the wondrous lake homes. I know the theft from which they came and hope they are all burnt someday.

Language and Diversity

Soon, it is likely diversity language will be applied to intellectual activity. Using logic and evidence will be defined as a "micro aggression". Criticism of work will be defined as potential abuse, and yet more campus diversity administrators will appear to scour the University program of language above a seven year old level, deeming it as "discriminatory against the intellectually non-inclined". Marking up a freshman 's poems and a male teacher calling them "iambic" and " solipsistic" will ignite an inquiry for sexism and the crime of patriarchy. Essays comparing the works of Margaret Atwood and Susan Sontag to the lyrics of Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj, the formers found wanting as intellectual classists who used their skills to demean and ignore the personal truth and experience of these new denizens of art. The French impressionists will be denounced as "smarties" who used color to denigrate the beautiful works of the colorblind using crayons while over caffeinated. Scientists and mathematicians, hounded and denounced in public for the crime of actively seeking knowledge, their aim a conspiracy to shame the uninformed. Twitter feed text using text speech declared the new Shakesperean English, a true language form that "doesn't use complex word arrangements and ideas and stuff" Truthfully, we are mostly already there.

Bring me my leeches

My work in Government taught me one lesson above all. The wealthy are the greatest receivers of public money. For them we build infrastructure, roads, sewers, pay for the employees to be educated and the health care.We clean up their environmental nightmares, or subsidize them with everything from under-cost land, minerals, timber or flat out fraudulent enterprises like the F-35 and the constant, endless stream of military hardware we pour into maintaining the empire and leave like scrap in places like Iraq. Many of them wouldn't exist if they weren't sucking off government contracts and bonding projects like starving vampires. But, if school children need something as simple as the minuscule funds for a trip to a museum, the great conservative voices thunder from the skies "Oh we cannot teach them to be freeloaders, they must earn their way by the value of labor." This class, if one carefully observes, has often never worked in the actual private sector making an honest living, but seems always employed in such difficult circumstances as conservative think tanks writing nonsensical screeds as propaganda pieces, or enjoying political appointments whenever their favorite son wins election. Anytime the words "Economic Development" or "Jobs" are attached to a private enterprise, the public should hide their wallets and seal-weld the public purse as you know it will soon be raided. Water supply lines for ski resorts, land exchange subsidies for mine proposals and infrastructure for "commercial development" are phrases that come to mind. "Developers" are best symbolized as parasites directing their host into absurdist financial suicides such as big box development. Consultants, lobbyists and "Government Affairs" specialists are to be feared much more than the addicts stealing valuables out of garages and cars as they are far more psychopathic and would gladly steal a baby's bottle if allowed. If a lobbyist ever entered my house I would be more watchful than if the most depraved drug cartel member entered, nailing my belongings to the floor and secreting my meager property into the closet guarded by a wolverine. Unlike the lobbyist, the cartel member has at least tried to work for his money. It is not just the owner class or Wall Street Bankers to be feared, but their servants in the consultancies, lobbying groups, law firms and the legislatures. As much an army of parasitical brain infections directing the body of the state into packing the wallets of them and their masters, they are to be hated as much as any group of crazed executives.

The Menagerie of Social Media. Voyeurism of the Sick and the Damned.

It is interesting that many recovering addicts I know are also the most eager to convict and judge the addicts posted in the media. It is as if they rationalize that because they are not using, that somehow that makes them different or "better", that if those still out there just "got it", then somehow they will change. No one ever "got it". You were kicked in the teeth repeatedly by family, friends, neighbors, courts, counselors, P.O.'s mental health professionals and your pets until it finally penetrated past the sincere delusion and you became aware that you might have a problem. For those of you with under ten years who think you are special, you are still at about a 50% probability of dying using. The next time you see a picture of some addict, usually ridiculed or posted for shock value, ask the questions "Do we do that to other illnesses?" Do we make them objects? Do we post pictures of lepers? Treat other illnesses as some sort of chamber of horrors menagerie? The odd thing is most of the crimes are petty. Theft. Some kind of low level fraud. Nothing even in remote comparison to what the bankers did in 2007-2008, or what the politicians did in starting the Irag War and torturing, maiming and killing people all to control oil for profits. We don't post pictures of Rumsfeld or the psychologist cum-psychopathic-monster James Elmer Mitchell, now retired on your tax dime, who designed the torture "program" and now lives in a Florida mansion. But you do post pictures of some poor addict looking disease ridden who's been busted for shoplifting a bag of potato chips, a truly dangerous crime against humanity. It is as if the surviving victims of the plague beat the ill for being sick screaming "devil be gone". It is an odd relationship.

Culture.....

The Full Throttle Saloon in Sturgis burns to the ground. And of course, truly reflecting the intelligence and depth of U.S. culture, the comments of grief rival those as if the Hermitage in St. Petersburg has burned, Stonehenge was destroyed by a meteor and Monk's Mound at Cahokia was swallowed by an earthquake. It was a tavern. In a small town. On land from the Treaty of Fort Laramie long since stolen. Named after a General whose central claim to fame was leading a modern, well equipped military column on a half continent wide chase of Natives defending the women and children they had with them. Popular because culture-less descendants of colonist Americans who can be sold anything, convinced to play dress up like extra's from the Al Pacino movie Cruising,revving 1930's technology motorcycles like 15 year olds, go there to drink crappy beer in overpriced costumes designed to extract as much of their earnings as possible and give an identity to their empty, meaningless lives by wearing a giant corporate advertisement and yelling "freedom".

Back to School Specials

NRA School Shooting Prevention Back to School Specials
1: “Little Kitty Kevlar” Backpack. Providing both great carrying capacity and triple layered kevlar protection system, your little angel can hold this up the next time a psychotic maniac with a semi-automatic weapon and 500 rounds of ammo shows up. Comes in pink and purple.
2: “Little Toy Soldier” Armored Hat: Yes, your little man can stay warm, be fashionable and not have his head blown off with this NRA “Top TBI Prevention Fashion Accessory of the Year”.
3: “My Big Girl Is Growing Up” Armored Training Bra and Panties. Protect those all important private places from injury. In Multiple colors and patterns including urban camouflage.
4: “I'm Invisible” Crowd Camouflage Schoolwear. Don't just protect your baby with body armor, but allow them to disappear into the crowd of victims with this computer generated pattern camouflage. They'll simply 'disappear” into the fleeing crowd or pile of squirming, wounded bodies.
5: “Wayne Lapierre Talking Teddy”. Yes, nothing will soothe your child's fears during a mass shooting like that voice of the 2nd Amendment. His recorded voice will calm the fears and emotional over-reactions like no one else: “Remember, that gun isn't shooting you, that maniac I allowed to have the gun did. Too bad he doesn't just have a small knife rather than a 30 round clip. God Bless America”.

Family Values

http://www.startribune.com/sheriff-lawmaker-cited-for-ma…/…/
Things I learned from the Republican family values education forum:
If your "basement is flooded", find an older, married fellow Republican legislator with talented hands to help remove your pants.

When you're "exchanging documents," do it in the same places other people go to to have anonymous hookups. And find better euphemisms.
Marriage is apparently between a man and a woman, a man, another man and a woman, a woman, a man and a legislator, or a man and two publicly stated lying hypocrites who hide out and fondle each other.
Apparently God saves us from uncomfortable situations by sending Park Rangers?

Katrina

This morning, there are the many articles about the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and all the various evils and errors that came from it. Blame, of course, is put on the various government administrations with some people more or less burned in journalistic effigy. None of them, however, mention that New Orleans was a textbook example of warnings on what not to do and where not live in undergraduate Natural Hazards and Water Resource management classed for decades before Katrina. This was not buried in obscure Academic journals,this was in undergraduate textbooks. There were plans, studies and two generations of scholars, scientists and engineers screaming " It is a disaster waiting to happen, not if, but when". But, because partytown with a bunch of horn players and some decent food has been there for a couple hundred years, the rest of the country is forced to pour in resources to protect and pump the water from a place that is below sea level and subsiding, while industry destroys the coastal wetlands. And when the disaster does happen, and the governor and the typically useless mayor of a city and state so dysfunctional that bribery is considered normal business, sit on their thumbs like halfwits terrified of the fact that what they had been warned of was actually going to happen, they then sat there blaming a small federal agency with no police powers and no authority. I have no sympathy. You built a house on an island and complained about getting flooded out in the spring. You were warned. A thousand times. And now, for ten years since, we have been told of the evils of redevelopment, how people have not returned, how there has been no funding for ordinary people. That is all typical, for the connected and powerful circle government funding and contracts like vultures. Here is the problem...No one should live there. No one. We should simply have resettled people elsewhere, rather than pouring money into a place that does not belong there. We should have cleaned up and bulldozed and let the water reclaim much of the place. Let it wither and die.

The Great Bwana and Cecil the Lion.

The Great Bwana and Cecil the Lion.

The recent shooting of a well known African lion by a Minnesota dentist has started a campaign against him, causing him to close his dental practice for a day. Lost in the storm is the long existing  underbelly of the rich, hunters and colonial culture  in treating the world as an object, Safari Club International. A world of canned hunts in private places where the privileged shoot an animal of their choice, much like royalty of old. It is best expressed by the “art” of taxidermy, where the once living being becomes a mere decoration, often a symbol of accomplishment. This has been true since colonization, whether poor Tasmanians, Native American or African. Both people and Thylacine are object  for collection, proving one’s man or womanhood via scalps and stuffed heads. Thus we have the numerous pictures of rich white people posing with the very inedible species of the world, for as any real hunter knows, carnivores do not taste good. Mr. Palmer is not unique, but is the very symbol of the great white hunter: despite the condemnation from any hunter or sportsmen group, he symbolizes the culture best. The world is for me and it’s beings are for my amusement and collection. The argument  put forth, as empty as anything, is always a bizarre mix of honoring the animal and self justification.  But, if one runs a simple thought experiment and uses human bodies as taxidermy, the consequences become a macabre moral maelstrom of horrific memory, with holocaust memorials and hidden pictures of colonists with the dead indigenous as result.  What has happened, is a newer way of thinking, part old and part new, now runs through the culture. It sees animals as having value unto themselves, a value very old and within many cultures, and another, that acts like this are immoral. Displaying such things is often now the butt of small penis jokes, something much closer  to the truth than most white men would dare to admit. It is all about empty manhood and the need for validation, and any subsistence hunter  knows that. You cannot eat the horns, a truism not needing mention. I have very little sympathy for Dentist Palmer,  as he has used his profits from overcharging patients and society to travel the world shooting animals he didn’t eat or need. Frankly, looking closely, the man, like many in our world, simply has acted psychopathically all his life and got away with it, for industrial society is that at its very core, a place for the wealthy to enjoy the soylent green of the natural world and other’s  labor. Thinking of the many doing hard time for selling bags of an innocuous weed, it is hard to feel any pity. He is still nothing more than a wealthy Cabela customer, however. His strain is as deep within our culture as is the myth Of George Washington’s honesty. The west was built on killing things for fun, whether King or colonist. It is all King  Leopold’s land.

The old man and the wolves

 Reading this: http://www.startribune.com/sports/outdoors/282833431.html, and inside my brain statistical hairs start standing on end, bells go off, and finally, a plague of mathematical modelling locusts descends and places the land into darkness. I read the original article with supplements here: http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70122639.

Rolling my R's...It is Crrrap. A 90% confidence interval for population estimates varying by up 5000 individual moose using two different survey methods the authors admit are not compatible, then evaluating variables using a "simple simulation study" for comparing the variables by what is experimental computation? Let me say this, I don't know who the reviewers were, but if I tried to pass off these methods, I should be laughed out of the room. When you have those kinds of error estimates with this sort of modest population size, then start using assumptive linear models to get p-values out of this, it is garbage. I The only way this was published was by his old name and employer. Before a reporter even dares start putting this opinion up, he needs a second opinion.

Celebrating Conquest is appropriate

A central myth of America's origins is the concept of the United States being somehow "different" or exceptional; this is at the core of our politics, and as much a myth as any other origin story. Reagan, the "Great Communicator", actually said very little of any substance based in reality. Instead, he repeated the myths that many Americans believe religiously, much like Dale Carnegie taught salesman. The cynical, gullible and indoctrinated lapped it as dog in gravy.

The United States, and the founders were neither different or exceptional. Our history, from the beginning, has as much been a conquest as any other nation state, ours built on the genocide of the natives, the enslavement of blacks and natives and the exploitation of poor whites. The founders cared not for "democracy" and in fact were terrified of it, thus the Republic. George Washington's central concern was property rights  across the Appalachians, taken from the natives and the hopeful profits derived more than anything else.

With this history, Columbus Day is actually an appropriate holiday to celebrate, for it honors a bloodthirsty, profit seeking European willing to exploit, murder and torture merely for his own enrichment and amusement, something at the very core of the United States culture as it was built on the genocide of the natives, the enslavement of blacks and natives and the exploitation of poor whites.  The view of natives and others as subhuman is just as much  American as it was of Columbus'. 

Welfare to Work...

Since Paul Ryan has shown such great concern for the poor and their deficiencies, I thought I would advocate for a new welfare to work program for those who truly don't know how: the children of the wealthy and well connected,  trust fund babies such as the poor Walton family children and Paris Hilton or legacies such Mika Brezenski and George W. Bush.  In local politics, we have Stewart Mills III, scion of Fleet Farm, graduate of the Amway-DeVos Northwoods University, aka the " Ayn Rand Institute for indoctrination of trust fund justification".

These people, having never learned the value of thrift and climbing  the ladder by intelligence, discipline and hard work,  raised at the hands of a pernicious private welfare state created by their forebears, oft by theft, swindle, government subsidy or just plain luck, have had to suffer the indignation of "getting a gold medal because their Grandfather won one" or "being born on third base and hitting a triple".

Oh the things they have suffered and  never experienced.

Forced to get debt-free Vanity degrees from private schools with guaranteed graduation and never having had to expedite financial aid to purchase food.

Never having had to choose strategic options for funding one's education such as high rate student loans or joining the military.

Never having had to actually work at whatever job is available, such as scrubbing toilets or scraping gum off the bottom of desks, rather than living vicariously and choosing  options such as a summer "helping out at a pet spa". Or, having had to work at three jobs while taking summer classes.

Learning math through calculating how long one's school debt will accumulate as any job obtained will never provide enough income to actually pay it off.

Or, choosing whether to fix the tail light or pay the car insurance, despite the probability of being stopped by the police because the piece of crap looks "suspicious".

Having to choose jobs that go against one's value system or serve some psychopathic monster just to earn a living because of the debt and the ridiculous system we live in.

No, these poor ingenue have never had to learn these lessons. Never having reached their full abilities due to this horrifying caste system, it is time to remove the illegitimate life support system which weakens them and cast them into the maelstrom of life, forcing them to make the same hard, dignified choices the ordinary must make so they can learn the value of hard work.

An estate tax of 90% for any value over $200,000 should suffice, as it allows them to fund an education or start a business. But, they will have to do something, and that will be for their own benefit. The rest can be doled out in small amounts by random lottery to other taxpayers, since knowing modern state capitalism, that's who it was likely stolen from from .

They, and the world, will be better for it.

Awaitng the Rapture

Scariest site of the day: Rapture watch. Complete with clock.
Since childhood, I wondered why so many were obsessed with prophecies based on the mistaken, lunatic mistranslations by whackjobs who can't read classical Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic. No, they say, if we search through the hidden meanings by taking the sixth letter of all three syllable words in the ravings of the island lunatic John of Patmos, author of revelations, transpose them with a mirror during a full moon,  vague references involving a herd of pigs, why not to slay goats on the shabbat and how to wipe your ass with a hot desert rock are found. Entire groups of people base their lives on this tripe, hoping and praying the imaginary deity will come and kill those who gave them wedgies in high school while mysteriously sparing the righteous, which always includes them no matter how many underage girls they've married in an illegal ceremony.

Always anticipating, finding signs, but never acknowledging it has been over 2000 years they've been waiting, that is if their deity actually ever existed. The end times may come, but not with a hail of imaginary trumpets and your grade school enemies dying, but in really high fuel prices, slums, economic turmoil, pollution, hunger, expensive food and right wing paramilitary squads paid by the rich to keep the poor from climbing the ramparts. Yes, Jesus is coming, but he's in El Salvador working as a guard for the oligarchs.

Food Taboos

All creatures eat other living beings. Everyone and everything is merely someone else's potential energy source, and in the world's view, I have no more value than the rotting carcass of any other large omnivore to be devoured by carrion beetles and assorted corvidae. Grass is as much a living being as any doe eyed fawn; we never mourn the grass or the white cedar as the deer eats them, however, since we don't value them in this culture; We don't place moral value on them. We usually reserve this for sentient beings with eyes and are similar to us. Thus dogs are no longer a work animal and potential food as they once were, but are instead bred into weird shapes that serve no purpose and can't survive without human intervention, dressing them up in costumes and calling them children. The same is true for guinea pigs, which are actually a source of food. Most of these taboos are merely derived from wealth and culture. They are really the mere privilege of a very large industrial machine  devouring everything on earth to produce boxed and frozen food. Almonds for humans have demolished habitat, require mass pollination and have no more moral value than any other large scale agricultural enterprise. We simply think they are better because almonds don't have pretty eyes and nurse their young, so people don't think they are killing anything. But they did; they destroyed thousands of acres of habitat for the monoculture, just as much as they bulldozed it into a mall and paved it. They have to import pollinators in the millions just to keep the entire enterprise going. Humans now use about 58% of the world's photo-energy for agriculture and that still isn't enough; we have to make nitrogen via the Haber process, use fossil fuels for production and transportation and mine all the materials in order to use it, from transportation to storage. No matter who you are, and especially if you live in the U.S., you are using whole pieces of the finite earth just to keep your gullet full. No one, except for the few hunter-gatherers left, is any more moral then the other, organic lettuce grown in human fecal compost not with standing.

I do know this; given a week or so without access to a grocery store, all sorts of moral taboos would disappear. Animals with big brown eyes would suddenly become edible to many. Many animals not thought of as food who also have big brown eyes would  become edible. Suckers, thought of as garbage fish, might suddenly become gourmet. Given a few more weeks, dogs would no longer be dressed in costumes. They would end up in stew or on a spit and served with onions. Anyone in the U.S. who claims different is laughable as they simply have not known hunger. After the woods and waters have been picked clean, which would be much faster than anyone thinks, certain other delicacies would arise with no cultural taboo; organic kale has very little value if you are ready to gnaw on tree bark.

The Travelers

I have a possible solution to the Central American child refugee problem that combines with a Para-Darwinian experiment. To make room for said children, we will trade the countries an equal number of immigration protesters. We will be ridding ourselves of half-witted intellectually deficient dead weight and upgrading the nations mean IQ. The H0 hypothesis is there would be no difference in the survival rate between the two populations after the first six months. I consider this doubtful as a group of children, already having been born and surviving the dangers of childhood disease, dealing with CIA created criminals, a train ride on top of freight cars and managing to make it to our border obviously has superior capabilities than a group of people who, despite the benefits of vaccination, education and fluoride, still can't compose a cogent sentence, take care of their teeth, read the documents they misquote and routinely believe conspiracy theories linking the UN, the Masons and lizard people. I am fairly sure we would find nothing but a trail of bones as a half hour into the exchange, they would insult locals, demand bottled water and, complaining of why no one speaks English in this country, be shot out of p!ain irritation.

Apekind

While others may fear other "apes" taking over, I don't. There is no possible way any of the other ape species (yes,we are one, albeit upright and sometimes hairless) could be as selfish, venal, stupid, deceiving or as easily distracted and entertained by stupidity as Homo sapiens americanus moronicus. Gorillas being impressed by shiny new truck rims or riding around dressed similarly, all on the same brand of motorcycle at the same time declaring individuality and freedom? Only a human being could deceive themselves so fundamentally. The chimpanzee, any more violent than the rapacious, blood lusting lunacy ( watch any boxing or mma audience) of the human being who makes killing an art form and justifies it by declaring it as "defensive"...a society that drops fire on stone age people then rewards the doers with medals for "courage"? No,even the flesh eating, sometimes violent chimpanzee is much more peaceful. The Orangutan? Intelligent and deliberately avoiding conflict while brachiating and eating fruit? . The Bonobo, capable of complex, symbolic language use and social negotiation? Look at the first ten rows of any monster truck or wrestling audience and make a comparison about social cohesion or intelligence along with the need for dental work. There is no contest. Hell...just looking across the street or watching a right wing news show tells me I would be better off with another species running the show. Perhaps not even another ape species...maybe another primate..dolphins...oh hell a predatory starfish. At least I wouldn't have to watch an ice dancing competition or a nascar race.