Let them eat stimulus checks

Instead of the good old Keynesianism we need– long-term government investment in projects to make the nation energy independent, a masive overhaul of the nation’s public transportation system and electricial grid, dramatic public works and incentives to remake the country from suburban sprawl to small towns and cities surrounded by productive farmland, incubating green businesses, and other things that need to be done anyway and which private industry can’t or won’t do–, each of us gets a couple hundred bucks in the mail and are told to… GO SHOPPING!

“Sure, I know you’re malnourished and need hearty, filling, nutritious food, over the long term, in order to return to healthful self-sufficiency… so here’s a little candy bar right now with lots of sugar. Be sure to eat it right away.”

Pathetic. Insulting. Completely backwards. So out of touch as to be condescending without even trying to be. Marie Antoinette calls out from the balcony in Crawford, Texas, “let them eat stimulus checks”.

We are the New Bulgaria

A friend here in the Bay Area bought a house in Bulgaria as an investment a few years ago, knowing that they were about to be admitted into the EU and the price of property would go up dramatically. He was right; it did. He’s considering selling it to pay off his Bay Area house with the profits.

Why would he stay here? Why not move to Bulgaria when the shit hits the fan here?

He said, when the shit hits the fan, this will BE Bulgaria. No need to move, there will be tons of work here, more than there will be there.

Huh?

What he meant was, cheap wages are kind of like strange loop. If your country falls apart, and your currency devalues, then you are more attractive as an employee for global corporate capital, because you’re working cheaper.

Living here, he reckons, with tons of work that Euro-based corporations are eager to pay for with worth-less-than-toilet-paper dollars, while living in a paid-off house, will be a better deal than living in Bulgaria, which will be much more affluent by comparison, and with fewer jobs available.

The Mosquito

When I see crap like this, I keep thinking of the old adage:

Be nice to your kids. Someday they’ll choose which nursing home you get to die in.

Within only a decade or two, those "loiterers" will be lawyers, doctors, senators, CEO’s, and congressmembers. And I’m sure those "mosquito" waves will still be echoing in their ears when it comes time for them to vote on, say, whether to continue to fund Social Security for you short-sighted morons.

The Anti-Bush

It’s a well-known phenomenon that when someone finally gets out of a miserable, bad, dysfunctional long-term relationship, their “rebound” partner tends to be the most wildly polar opposite of the person they were stuck with.

This is true in politics too. It’s all human nature, it’s all relationships, after all.

After suffering through the paranoid, vindictive, mean-spirited, power-hungry Nixon, who did we elect? The most honest, friendly, smiling, soft-spoken, reassuring, and soft-hearted person in politics at the time: Jimmy Carter.

Today, after 8 years of small-minded, petty, aggressive, negative, parochial, and divisive Bush, I will predict that we will elect, in a landslide this November, the most hopeful, relentlessly optimistic, inclusive, uplifting figure that has strode into the political arena in the last 40 years: Barack Obama.

I wasn’t a huge Obama fan to start with (Kucinich was my man, then Edwards as a second), but I’m sold now. The guy is like a dream come true. Finally, waking from our 8-year-long nightmare, someone who can pull this nation together in hope and positive energy. He’s such a huge relief after dealing with Bush, he brings tears to people’s eyes.

Earlier on, I though Clinton was a shoo-in becuase so many people (myself included) had become nostalgic for the peaceful, prosperous Clinton years. Life was so much better then! I predicted that people would pull the “Clinton” lever just because of that, and many perhaps are doing exactly that this primary season.

But Obama isn’t just better than Bush, or a return to the better days of the Clinton administration. Obama is the complete opposite of Bush in almost every possible way, and with a vision and optimism to propel us forward. That’s very, very compelling.

I think Obama could turn the country around through sheer force of charisma, optimism and “yes we can” inspirational spirit. I think Clinton could do it too, being the technocrat she is, and especially with her hubby hanging around the Oval Office and knowing probably better than anyone else how the machinery of government works and how to operate it.

Either way, we win. But right now, my money’s on Obama. I think he reaches people in their hearts, and that’s where votes come from.

The dollar is dead

The dollar is dead. The American Century is so over.

I wanted to order a t-shirt from a great European nu-jazz band that I like a lot. Their t-shirts are silk-screened in Sweden by some friends of the band.

They are 20 Euros each. Apparently that’s pretty cheap/normal for a T-shirt there.

I can get t-shirts silk-screened here for US$15. So I figure a t-shirt is not a hugely expensive thing to make.

Then I looked it up… and 20 Euros would be like US$40!! Forty bucks for a fucking t-shirt??! Not including shipping, of course. No way.

That’s nuts. I emailed the band, and they kind of shrugged, apparently 20 Euros is not a lot of money over there.

I can imagine now what it must have been like to have lived in the Soviet Union just before it collapsed, when a pair of French or American designer bluejeans cost the equivalent of six months’ wages in Roubles.

The USA is in a steep decline, and I’d say a collapse is imminent.

Forty dollars for a t-shirt! I’ll just make my own American (Chinese, really) T-shirts instead, thank you.

Ron Paul is the Ralph Nader of 2008

I see Ron Paul signs everywhere these days, in a lot of the same places that I used to see Ralph Nader signs in 2000.

I’d encourage Paul to run as an independent, because he’d completely cripple the Repug party the way that Nader cripped the Democratic party in 2000. Come to think of it, whatever loser the Repugs end up running this year will cripple their own party, much as Gore’s inability to woo and/or fight the corporate media crippled the Democrats in 2000.

But then I wonder: will Paul cripple the Repugs or will he siphon off too many Democrats and end up hurting the really strong candidates the Democrats have lined up for 2008? I ask this, because I see a lot of Paul signs in liberal, hippie areas. Creeps me out because these people have no idea what Paul actually stands for: the privatization of everything, and handing our whole country over completely to massive, global, multinational corporations, without even the pretense of trying to govern them or counter their immense power.

Hey, hippie with a Ron Paul sticker, weren’t you in Seattle in 1999? Why the fuck are you even thinking about Ron Paul? Sheesh.

The useless dick

Men are useless in modern, Western society.

I’ve been thinking about this for many years. Gentlemen, we’ve worked ourselves out of a job over the last hundred years or so.

We’ve designed machines that do almost all of the heavy lifting and dangerous work. Our food is grown, caught, harvested, slaughtered, processed, and shipped around, by machines. We’ve built social structures based on law, and discussion, and technology, that eliminate danger and risk. Even our wars are fought by machines and computers. We’ve built consumer, convenience economies based on complex and convenient exchanges of blips and mental constructs, on partnerships and alliances and cunning and intelligence and social interchange which are female strengths, not on brutality and fighting and might and assumption of risk and other traditional male strengths. Of course this is a tremendous boon– the essence of civilization. And I’ve never had much talent for– or patience for– macho bullshit anyway. But my point is: women can do civilization better than we can.

Men have become useless; masculinity has become more of an unseemly vestige from a vanished era.

I find that this might explain a lot of things.

I think Michael Moore nailed it: the right-wingers are so virulent and vicious and loud, because it’s their last gasp. They’ve become irrelevant, and they are very, very pissed off about it. The Neanderthals in the fundamentalist Christian churches, in the fundamentalist Islamic madrassas, in the Military-Industrial complex, in the “traditional” patriarchal cultures, are history. They’re howling with indignation at the fact that there is no place for them anymore in this world. George W. Bush is a blustering, idiotic, cartoon-cowboy asshole, because that’s all that remains of masculinity; he (and his few remaining followers like Bill O’Lielly, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc.) are holding on to it for dear life. And they look so ridiculous doing it.

The book and movie “Fight Club” says it most plainly: we are a generation of men raised in a world dominated by women. Some are OK with that, some are lost, and some strike out against it in silly and pathetic ways. But it won’t help– this is a woman’s world.

Intensely interconnected, complex social environments, like beehives and ant colonies, are dominated by females. Nature keeps only a few males around for mating. That’s it, and the boys don’t do much else. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s certainly not any kind of position of power or influence. Everything else is run by the girls, because they do a better job of it.

That’s how the ants and bees do it, anyway. If this project of civilization continues for another thousand years or so, I predict that you’ll see a similar gender distribution– and division of labor– among homo sapiens as well.

Wow. Just wow.

5: Let’s Explore The Possibility of an Open Source Monetary System.
6: Let’s End Corporate Personhood and Other Rules that Unfairly Advantage Corporations.

Wow. Just wow. Someone with actual readership is now saying these things I’ve been saying for almost 7 years now.

I’m thrilled!

I have to disagree with R.U. Serius’s proposed solution: starting a third party. No, I think these ideas need to be pushed into the party of the people, the Democratic party, through grassroots effort. I personally believe we have to reclaim our party from big-money corporate lobbyists, first, before there’s any hope of reclaiming the country from them.

But I will support those two efforts– overturning corproate personhood and creating open-source money systems– with everything I’ve got.

Right-wing apologetics for inefficient government

This one is beautiful. Here is an ultra-right-wing libertarian “stink tank”, defending an inefficient and incompetent government agency wasting taxpayer dollars.

James Jay Carafano, a domestic security expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said TSA critics might have unrealistic expectations. “The system is never going to be perfect, it’s never going to stop everything,” he said.

Of course. It’s perfectly OK for the gummint to waste your tax dollars, as long as it’s Bush and the Repugs doing the wasting.

These clowns have gone beyond being parodies of themselves, to a whole new level of meta-satire.

You Americans

In online discussions with Europeans, occasionally the topic turns to “you Americans” and some observation or complaint– ranging anywhere from polite and benign to angry and confrontational– about our character (or lack thereof), etc etc.

I always find this amusing coming from Europeans, because, what is an American, really? “You Americans” certainly doesn’t mean actual, genetic Native Americans, who barely remain anywhere north of the Rio Grande; their numbers have been decimated by a genocide perpetrated wholly by– Europeans.

So who are “we” Americans, anyway? I’m of 50% Italian and 50% Sicilian blood. Genetically, I “am” 100% European (maybe a bit of North African and Middle Eastener, too, based on the history of Sicily).

I look at the ruling class of this country, and they’re nearly all of European origin– mostly British, German, Scotch, and Irish. “Bush” is an English surname, “Clinton” and “Rodham” certainly likewise. If Obama makes it through the primary and to the presidency, I suspect he’d be the first significantly non-European ever to serve in that office.

“We” Americans aren’t a people or a nation in any traditional sense of the word. Most of us are Europeans by blood. A growing number of us have a bit more “American” in us, descended from “los Indios” of Mexico and Central/South America. The remainder come from every other nation on the planet. We’ve generally been the people from Europe who were too rebellious or ambitious or greedy to be content with our “station”, or had religious or political beliefs too bizarre or heretical or threatening. I guess “we” still are, if anything, still that, so there are some differences.

But, dear Europeans, at the root of it, “we” are “you”.