Dangerous Drivel

People who have never truly experienced war often speak and write of it like it’s some romantic thing of glory that will solve much and inhibit little.

No.

War is the failure of humankind.  The times that it is necessary are very, VERY few.

Word for today in this all-too-early season of campaigning, which has become more the activity than governing or working for real, problem-solving, society-enhancing policy: Jingoism.

Hollow

On this remembrance day, let us be on guard for the hollow pride.

We too often have the hollow pride of the spoiled boy who is haughtily arrogant about running the once-dominating business he inherited, and can’t grasp that the business is going downhill rapidly. 

Vacuousa a la Roma

The ethical decline of selfish “elites,” and the spiritual vacuousness of the West in general, and the US in particular, are demonstrated in how many non-elites are willing to join anything with a sense of surety, even if that surety comes with a violent and regressive nature, as with the Islamic State group.  If that surety is also trying to overthrow the often corrupt and often self-serving Western and Western-supported order, it finds even more attraction.  Those willing to join have morphed from Middle-Eastern related people to people of all kinds.  Will this cause the West, and especially the US, to look at itself?  Unlikely.  What is more likely is that the West will merely escape into more diversion, denial, and blind reaction.  A foundational crisis—already in motion from environmental and other factors—could be in the offing, and failing to meet that crisis would signal the decline and fall, however slowly or quickly, of Western civilization.  Ironically, just as much of the world wants so many elements of that civilization. 

Rather like Rome less than 2000 years ago.

Help With The Head Scratching

The new pan-Arab Muslim caliphate in forming seems to have thrown the establishment and everyday Americans for a loop.  While far too complex to delve into in a few lines, here’s some points to consider, although, like many such ponderings, it might make you uncomfortable:

1.     When populations are kept in poverty and ignorance, the simplistic appeal of those with certainty and determination/fanaticism will increase.  It isn’t all about terrorism or fear.

2.     When divisions and sectarianism predominate, “us against them” can get a population to overlook much.

3.     When “Great” powers are content with, or even foment, local strongmen or the corrupt instead of justice, they earn the disdain of the oppressed.

4.     When “Great” powers intervene, and especially when they intervene arrogantly and with little knowledge, care, or respect, let alone whether the intervention is even warranted, the second and third order effects they create can sometimes be gargantuan and disastrous.

5.     When those who are dismissed as merely fanatics or terrorists get basic services (electricity, water, transportation) to consistently and reliably work for a population, you don’t have to have in-depth knowledge of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to understand why a populace might give tacit support.

6.     Movements, even deeply flawed or questionable movements, don’t grow by terrorism and fear alone; look to the above for some reasons why they can be strong and why those who oppose them may not be.

DoI

As I reread all the Declaration of Independence reprinted in the newspaper yesterday, I had a thought:  How many people, in how many countries, that we have been in in the last 60 years, would read those words and think, “how bitterly ironic.”

Hedges Still Not Wrong

Uh hum.  America.  I keep probing for you to prove Hedges wrong, but you aren’t. 

Rabid, selfish, shortsighted anti-tax mania gets us decaying infrastructure instead of improving and expanding infrastructure, and all sorts of bad 2^nd and 3^rd order effects, including a structurally anemic economy.  The more we close in on ourselves, beset by the uncaring myopic selfishness of the plutocrats, the more we feed a system that is dooming itself to fail disastrously.   

Exercise Care

We strengthen government in the areas most to be feared.  We weaken it in the areas we most need its protection in.  We gut its funding stream. We heap derision on it.

One day we could find the results of all that to be that its repressive instruments are strong, but serve only the plutocrats, who use it to keep themselves ever wealthier and us ever poorer and dependent on them for most things.  And the levers that we will reach to pull to try to rein in our oppressors will have broken, rusted out, or been entirely dismantled or made irrelevant.

The Formerly Pure--And Pure Nonsense

Remember when rainwater was considered “pure?”  We’d stick our tongues out and taste the purity.

Largely no longer. The amount of impurities in typical rainwater today has made a little mockery of that. 

Those are the things—the things that matter—we need to be upset about, talking about, contacting our “representatives” about.  Not being upset and talking about the words or actions of some “celebrity,” or emotive anguish and repeatedly expressed and discussed crushing disappointment over some sports team or sports figure.

Because our emphasis on those fleeting spectacle things just show how easily we  are led (and lead ourselves) into deflective, delusional, self-destructive irrationality.

You, Boob

Let me preface: I enjoy a good/interesting/funny/etc. YouTube video now and then.

But IF the up and coming generations are going to address the problems we have, let me suggest that it won’t be by endless fixation with one inane YouTube video after another. Every bit of time, energy, and thought spent by all the Neros fiddling on those while Rome burns sees the problems get worse—and the plutocrats become more secure by our willing diversion.

Stay In, Tune Out, Get Sluggish, Get Foggy

We spend too much time indoors, sitting or laying down, breathing indoor air, getting little or no exercise.

At Christmas, I could enlist no one to take a walk after dinner.  That is, after engorgement on copious amounts of food, much of it sweet or otherwise not good for us.  Could get no one to take a walk in 30s degree weather with no wind.  I walked the trails and never met another person. My son, 20, said, “Are you crazy, dad? It’s December.”

If we are that appallingly weak, we have no chance to maintain this “system” or this “empire.”  Events—Nature or a stronger culture—will eat us like a lion eating kittens.

Real Life Mr. Potters Are Having a Merry Christmas

My retired uncle and aunt live in a once-thriving upper working class/lower middle class neighborhood, the same one they have for nearly 50 years.  The transformation of the economy from being middle class centric to upper class centric has unfortunately also transformed their neighborhood.  The good jobs the people who lived there once held are largely gone.  Rental houses now dominate.  The neighborhood pool has closed, and the neighborhood association has dissolved.

My uncle did everything right.  He bought used cars not new, paid off his little house early and never “traded up,” invested in the stock market, and although he had a decent pension and Social Security, he saved enough money in addition to live comfortably, raise three daughters, go on vacations, and be able to enjoy his retirement.

Except that picture is marred.  He now sees, where perhaps he didn’t before, that if you take care of yourself only—if you aren’t helping to support, sustain, and fight for a healthy economy and social structure for the rest of people, ultimately it won’t matter because of all the stress around you.

That’s the way it is—unless you’re super rich.  Then you can live—courtesy of the decisions you support that gut the places like my uncle lives—in a gated community, with armed guards, amid a purposely ignorant life of relative seclusion and disconnection at others’ expense.

Potter may not have won in Frank Capra’s fictional holiday classic, but his ideological brethren are well winning in real life. 

Just like the same Roman wealthy did. Until they could no longer escape the results of theirs and their predecessors' myopically selfish decisions.

Plutocrat Service Doesn't Generate Enough

People want to do useful work.  There’s just not enough of it in a plutocratized economy, one designed to serve the wealthy, because there’s just not enough wealthy people.  The shrinking middle class doesn’t have the economic wherewithal to make enough of a difference, and certainly isn’t going to borrow much more.  Even the mismatch of skills, where a number of good jobs go begging because there’s no one qualified to fill them, does not account for enough to truly make a difference even if they were filled.

And so you don’t get a real “recovery.”

You Thought Voting Was A Right? Silly You.

Need a crash course in voter disenfranchisement?  Watch The Daily Show, August 5, 2013.

And remember, voter fraud, supposedly the reason for all the disenfranchising measures (it couldn’t be race, economics, or partisanship) is statistically non-existent.  And state legislatures around the country, with all the pressing problems, made this their top priorities?

Decay In Civilization's Teeth

Civilizations that are on tracks of continuance may do sub-optimal or even regrettable or tragic things as they confront problems.  Decaying and declining civilizations exhibit denial, delay, or even refusal to confront pressing problems.

America leads the decay.  The rest of “Western” civilization is making some attempts to confront its problems, albeit with significant drag from the millstone of the dysfunctional US colossus.  And Western Europe has a lot of problems, chief among them the same manpower and population problems it had during late Roman times.

Albert Einstein supposedly once worried that our technology would one day make us idiots and fools who don’t talk to each other, but at best only (and even then disconnectedly) to a limited group of people who “think” like us.  Wonder what he would say today?

Persnickety

For those of who tire of the Persnickety Prof, yet are still in denial about plutocratic control, I refer you to Thursday’s Daily Show (7/25/13).  There you can see a demonstration of how Wall Street owns America, for just one firm does billions in market manipulation and insider trading—colossal scale crimes—and nothing happens. 

Nor is going to. Even the Senate Banking Committee only has five members show up, merely to lazily dance around the fact that Americans are being fleeced.

My question for the moment: Will those, many generations from now, be able to understand our political comedy like we understand ancient Greek and Roman political comedy?

Crumbs For The Masses

$8.23.  That’s what my share of the aggregate net settlement fund for an egregious matter concerning a Wall Street firm/bank was.  After the legal fees, of course.

Trial lawyer firms enrich themselves while their opponents write it off as business expenses.  And what of the aggrieved, the ones supposedly at the center?

Dogs at the tables of the poor fare far better.

Oh well, I’ll buy a good smoothie or something. :)

Wait, isn’t that what they expect?  For us to shrug about the crumbs?

68 Years Ago, We Had Defeated Nazi Germany and Were About to Defeat Imperialist Japan

From the strong, thriving Republic at the end of the Second Punic War, to the demise of the Roman Republic, was a period of about only 130 years. 

Could we be over halfway through a similar time frame? 

Damn The Poor

Instead of anger and discontent toward a self-serving upper class, it has been turned on the poor.   Words and phrases like “Entitlements,”  “Welfare,”  “Nanny State,” and “THEIR cost of living increases,” dot the lexicon and drive both the focus and what passes for debate.  Plutocrats and their servitors rule, and others are ruled, whether they know it consciously or not.

Return of the Roman Theme

Many, American Farmland Trust among them, are worried about the declining number of family farms.  I point out here to the reader that this pattern of decline was repeated previously by Roman Italy.  Right before the Italian peninsula started to decline, and Rome with it.

That Federal Government Jobs Are So Attractive Is A Bad Sign

A government job should not be top line “good,” but instead adequate and steady.  It’s a sign of a labor-commoditized and anemic economy when the private sector isn’t the attractive engine for “good” jobs.

 Once again, for we seem to need reminding, the productive private sector furnishes the taxes that fund government jobs.  If the private sector is weak, which it structurally is now, that begins to emplace an unsustainable pattern.

Another of the many warning signs all over.