annals of moranitude

So we got Cain the Brain making wild and demonstrably false claims about Planned Parenthood's gencidal plots, Wick Pewwy trying to pump up the Iraq War so it can be held over for another year or so, Michele Bachmann muttering incoherently -- something about the Holy Ghost and the fire -- and the Obama administration trying to float embarrassingly phony stories about Iranian plots to use a debt-addled used-car salesman to assassinate ambassadors and partner with al Qaida.

The clowns of our political circus have been refusing to deal with the country's real problems for years now, but only recently has their show degenerated into neanderthalish grunts and crude gestures calculated to appeal to whom? Who is the intended audience for this kind of pathetic idiocy? Morons and mouth breathers?

The American political system is now deader than a smoked oyster. Big changes are coming, but they're going to come from the bottom and percolate upward -- from the grassroots.

The most important thing now is for each of us to take our lives back, to live the way we see fit, free from megabanks and poisonous agribusiness pesticides and lobotomizing televised moranitude, all of which can easily be replaced by habits and activities which promote life and confer dignity -- organic gardening and reading for pleasure, for example.

And of course, a large part of composting the rotted-out remnant of our political system will only occur when we confront their domestic police army of aggression, out in the streets.

old scenes revisited

Today as I was going home I was briefly held captive at the Hood Canal Bridge, because the drawbridge had opened to let a nuclear submarine go through. I'm sure I'll sleep better tonight having been reminded that we have a nuclear submarine fleet based out of Bangor, to ward off the Soviet threat and keep those dirty commies over there from trying anything funny with Uncle Sam.

Like I said, the captivity was short, but not short enough, because the ferry was pulling away from the dock just as I and a bunch of other people arrived at the tollbooths. But what the hell, I'm retired now, and have nothing but time so it don't make no nevermind.

The reason I was over there on the other side of the Great Water of the Salish Sea, attempting to negotiate boat schedules and the Hood Anal Bridge was because I spent another weekend over there in the enchanted forest. It's lovely in the enchanted forest, and it's also getting to be a habit. And that's OK.

pluto's rule

Like anything else, if there's only a limited amount of good journalism available, we have to import some. Al Jazeera ran a very good program on the Kochs last night on their series "People and Power."

In the 2010 congressional elections, the Kochs and their partners spent at least $40m, helping to swing the balance of power in the US House of Representatives towards right-wing Tea Party Republicans. It has been reported that the Kochs are planning to raise and spend more than $200m to defeat Obama in 2012. But the brothers could easily kick in more without anyone knowing due to loopholes in US law.

The Kochs founded and provide millions to Americans for Prosperity, a political organisation that builds grassroots support for conservative causes and candidates. Americans for Prosperity, which has 33 state chapters and claims to have about two million members, has close ties to Tea Party groups and played a key role in opposing Obama's health care initiative.


It was Americans for Plutocracy Prosperity that got that little weasel Scott Walker installed in the Wisconsin governor's office, and it's no exaggerration to say that these overcompensated, nefarious clowns. through their control of state houses, have usurped the rule of large parts of the country. They're said by al Jazeera to be on the verge of unseating Obama and getting one of their fascist tools installed in the White House. Pwesident Wick Pewwy?

They will soon experience a head-on collision with a rapidly-percolating revolution.

po townsend

The well-preserved and impeccably Victorian tourist destination of Port Townsend, perched at the far northeast tippy-toe of the Olympic Peninsula, is experiencing a sign of the times -- a cash crunch.

The reasons for all the deficit, revenue, and spending problems plaguing localities all across the country are too well known already to rehash here: lack of revenue sharing from the fed to the states means states have less money to share with municipalities, but by far the biggest problem is declining tax revenues due to the collapse of real estate values in the Great Recession of 2007 to the present.

So now, with very low cash reserves and a $21-million-dollar debt, the city administration's political opponents are sharpening knives and grumbling that Port Townsend is on the verge of bankruptcy.

“I am not apologizing for the decisions this council has made,” (Mayor Michelle) Sandoval said at Monday night's City Council meeting, referring to city investments in utility and infrastructure upgrades. “We have shown leadership in tough times. The city is not on the verge of bankruptcy, despite the fact that the detractors in the community relish the thought of that.”

Infrastructure and utilities upgrades are certainly worthy of municipal spending since they put people to work, but if the two traffic roundabouts recently installed presumably to slow traffic on the city's main access road and highway into town are an example of the type of spending the mayor is talking about, I would question the city's choice of projects.

But I, like most of the people around here, have a lot more to learn about this situation, which has been kept quiet up until now.

journalism = history

The best daily, comprehensive coverage of the 99 percent movement that I've seen is at the Think Progress blog.

1%

From Juan Cole's blog (juancole.com)

the robotnor hour

A day after he refused to endorse an Ohio ballot measure that limits public employee union rights, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he is "110 percent" behind the effort.

readem hia.

wtf news

Omigod this is incroyable.

Rev Pat Robertson says on TV that the GOP base is "too extreme."

Well, if a man of God says it, I believe it.

And this from a guy who once publicly asked God to create more vacancies on the court.

clicka clicka whirr whirr

The biggest problem the Romney thing will have with getting elected is that it's not human. Everybody made a big deal about electing a black president or a woman president, but are we ready for a robotic, non-human president?

Every time a reporter asks the Romney thing a question, there's a momentary pause as the gears mesh and the answer, statistically engineered to please the largest and offend the smallest numbers of voters, issues from the thing's "mouth" with a kind of burry, raspy, mechanically articulated sound meant to approximate the human voice.

As with its sound, so with its look, and the Romney thing does have the superficial look of a clothes-wearing hominid, though it appears to be suffering from anxieties so extreme that its face is about to fall off. That will never happen, though, because if it did the voters would see the solid-state electronics behind that carefully-configured, handsome "face."

This is the true source of the Romney thing's "electability problem" -- that most voters deep down suspect what it really is, and are aware on some level of what it's really not.

let the dead bury the dead

As it invariably does, the conversation at BeliefNet returned once more to the virtues of faux-democracy and the efficacy of voting. One correspondent suggested fines for those who neglect their civic duty, especially for those who don't vote and then "whine about government not working."

But I say What's the point of voting? (Except in local elections, of course.)

To do so is to participate in the moribund political system of a country that no longer exists.

RIP USA, impaled on the triple horns of endless war, endless debt, and the hallucination of endless growth.

the museum of endless growth

A lot of the people opposed to the occupation and some who are involved in it tend to
forget that #OWS doesn't oppose a system that's still viable.

The American economy and US government had already ceased functioning in any rational or self-sustaining way long before the occupation arose spontaneously. The resistance now occupies a cadaver, or more accurately, a zombie.

Credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, liars' loans and multi-trillion-dollar deficits, endless wars and the hallucination of endless growth -- these were the means by which the old regime destroyed itself.

The "stupid? or evil?" question remains interesting. Personally I'm leaning toward "stupid," or maybe even "unconscious."

conquest

(First published April 17, 2009)

Far, far, far to the east the conquerer wanders
For 13 years, forsaking home and family,
East of Delphi, east of Eden, even east of Nod.
High, high into the heavens they follow him,
clambering over the ancient Pāriyatra Parvat,
Just below God's throne.

And then across the desert at the top
Of the world, his dusty fighters dying of thirst,
Neither wishing to stop, nor willing to go on,
Until at last that fabled stream, the Oxus
Reaches out to them, renews them, and
So they cross over, into the enchanted place --
Bactriana beyond the Kush.

Drunkenly veering, slashing and cutting
A crimson eastward-trending gash across the land,
Living on blood, hung over at the van of a screeching mob
Of dusty savages in rusty breastplates,
Neither aware of his crimes nor knowing why
he does them, leaving a harem of sore-butt boys
in his train, now the conqueror pauses at last.

Bactriana! land of strange and hairy beasts,
And well-horsed warriors who fly like wind
On their shaggy ponies, but who stood like stones,
locked up with fear when Iskander's name comes to their ears.
But he, knowing that his numbers are reduced,
And never by careless arrogance seduced,
Looks round for sheltering walls.

A local baron with a marriageable daughter
Prudently offers the conqueror shelter, rest and water.
Barely sixteen, but spurred by ambition and her only chance,
This embryonic Queen of the World adorns herself to dance.
And there at the roof of the world, stars fell in showers of gold,
The night Roxanne of Bactria danced for the conqueror of old.

Northern Indian miniature: "Roxanne and Alexander." Click on image for a larger view.

--30--

oops

I inadvertently left my computer's power plug on the Olympic Peninsula when I came home from there yesterday, so there'll be very light posting for the first part of the week.

--Forgetful Jones

Lips, Inc.

The USA I'm living in right now consists of decent, hard-working people, most of whom try to be completely honest in their dealings with each other. It's that old "treat others the way you'd like to be treated" thing. And I do love this country.

The higher up you go on the social ladder, the more false faces you see.

At the highest echelons of government, banking, and business, you can always tell when people are lying. You know you're being lied to whenever their mouths are moving.

which one is the dummy?

This is just coming over the TV today:

(CNN) -- The United States will withdraw almost all its troops from Iraq by the end of the year, as a current agreement with Iraq dictates, a U.S. official told CNN Friday.

Only about 150 troops, a negligible force, will remain to assist in arms sales.


It stands to reason we'll soon be out of there, since the government we ourselves installed to act as our puppet has ordered us to go, so they can conclude their alliance with Iran without any interference.

Things have come to a pretty pass when the dummy starts ordering the ventiloquist around.

on the road again

Today was a work and travel day, with no time to post.

G'daffy died last night, as did my aunt. At 99 she was the last of the siblings.

Also, the oldest member of our local yoga community died, at 90.

Tempus fugit.

the boner gap

TBogg is a very funny guy who writes a sub-blog at Firedoglake.com, and yesterday he picked up on a fleck of drool that dropped glisteningly from the keyboard of David Brooks, the Times's most celebrated clueless columnist.

Brooks wrote: This project begins with the pessimism and anger you see in the protest movements. Seventy percent of Americans now say their country is in decline, according to various polls. When people are gloomy they have fewer babies, and, sure enough, fertility rates have dropped sharply, with the most dramatic plunges occurring in the hardest hit states, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

And TBogg snarkily responds: Yes, when people are having sex at all, it’s sad sex and not the kind of sad cringing weeping sex that Marcus Bachmann has with his “wife” in order to keep up appearances. No, America has become flaccid and desultory; a nation that once said “Yes, we can!” now says “I have to get up early and stand in line for government cheese and, besides, Tim Allen is on Leno…”

...Third parties have formed over smaller things than this. And not yours, yours is perfectly… average.

Now I take sex very seriously, because like it or not, it's how we all got here. Still, does David Brooks really think that a lack of erotic enthusiasm among the victims of mass unemployment and foreclosure, people who don't have a hard on or a window to throw it out of, is significant? Or even surprising?

clash of the dinosaurs

There was something new in the big clown show, aka Republican debate last night.

I haven't seen any video, but from the stills the news sites are running it looked like Perry was about to give Romney a good ol' redneck ass kicking.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"

let there be drums

I played drums for 50 years, both as a vocation and an avocation, and even though I no longer play, still appreciate those who do as well as the great ones of the past.

Other than Gene Krupa and along with Buddy Rich, probably the most influential pre-Vietnam-era drummer was Luigi Paulino Alfredo Francesco Antonio Balassoni, better known by his stage name, Louie Bellson. He pioneered the use of double-bass kits and is the only white drummer I know of who ever played with Duke Ellington's Orchestra. Here he is soloing in 1957.



By coincidence, or because, as a reliable source told me today, the Italians have always been going into Africa, one of the best two or three drummers in the world playing right now is also Italian. Andrea Vadrucci, born near the little town of Lecce and now residing in Los Angeles, has all of Louie Bellson's intensity, plus his strokes are even more precisely executed than the great master's. I attribute this to the matched grip drummers use nowadays, which is far superior to the unmatched grip all of us used in prehistoric times, before Ringo Starr and the Beatles made their first appearance on Ed Sullivan.

Vadrucci, performing under the name Vadrum, tears up the theme from the video game SuperMario Bros.

dirty fucking hippies

What with Eric Cantor, everybody's fave fascist gunsul, saying over the weekend that income inequality in the US is '"a problem," even some of the banksters "on the 31st floor" behind that plutocratic "gold plated door"* are having second thoughts about where they've taken us.

According to Krugman this morning, "Right now, the two most prominent institutions calling for an end to the disastrous turn to short-run austerity are … Goldman Sachs and the International Monetary Fund."

(snip)

"Meanwhile, the IMF special report for the G20 (pdf) is essentially a declaration that the focus on universal austerity was wrong, wrong, wrong."

So it turns out the hippies were right. Not just about this, but about everything.

The moral of the story: be a hippie.

*In quotes: lyrics from "Sin City" by the Flying Burrito Brothers, 1970.