Governments, Technology, and Revolution

You are alive in 2014. And that's so much better than 1914. All that disease eradicated. A standard of living so high, that even if its stagnated, it'll take 500 years for some countries to catch up. A constant, reliable supply of food and medicine. And oh, the technology. Skyping with your pants off while your significant other rambles on in Dickensian fashion on Facebook. Curved TV's. GPS collars on Chihuahuas. And don't forget that gadget keeping track of your caloric outflow as you jog by that gaudy bitch's $3.4 million Tudor-style house.


But alas, as great as you think you have it, you are eternally fucked. The advancement we all believe has infinitely improved our drab existence, has in reality guaranteed you will never matter again. And if you and your brethren ever try to become relevant again in any significant economic or political fashion, you will be vaporized. And it'll only get worse.


For all the benefits technology has granted you, it has granted the ruling elite exponentially more power and advantages. And they knew they needed such advantages. The ruling elites are one of the exceptional few groups who are aware that history repeats itself. And they have taken steps to ensure that any detrimental Guillotinesque repeats never happen again to them.


I am reminded of a quote from my favorite Pixar film of all, "A Bug's Life". After the subservient ants failed to deliver their fresh crops to the ruling elites - the grasshoppers - a low ranking grasshopper in the midst of intense debauchery questions his leader's desire to go back and scare the ants again, in order to keep them in line. The leader responds, "Those ants outnumber us 100 to 1. If they ever figure that out, our way of life is over!"


Throughout history, whenever the ants realized they outnumbered the grasshoppers 100-1, or 1,000 to 1, revolution ensued. Rapid violent change occurred. Dynasties rose out of the ashes, as others lay hanging in the gallows of history. But not anymore. Technology has put the final nail in the coffin of any future revolutionary aspirations that ants may entertain. For starters, the weapons advantage that Governments enjoy relative to the weaponry of the proletariat is now larger than at any point in history, with all due respect to Mr. Kubrick and the opening salvo of "2001: A Space Odyssey". Whereas fiery catapults and daggers once gave the charging masses a fighting chance vs cannons and crossbows, todays pissed off ants have no such chance of success. The weapons technology gap is now too wide. Coupled with surveillance techniques which now have more storage capacity (by far) than all the knowledge mankind has ever accumulated, and you'd be lucky if you made it to Starbuck's to meet Carlos and discuss a million man cyber-march before DHS whisked you off in a black van.


And this says nothing of the government's ability to change majority consensus via MSM. Perhaps one of the greatest social shifts of all time occurred when society's fiercely negative opinion of Vietnam and its veterans was somehow crafted into unending praise of our war machine. Throw out the first pitch. Sing the National Anthem. Show the country how well you can dance. And all this in less than a generation. All wars are noble. And all its participants are nobility.


So listen up, little man. Your weapons suck. Big Brother knows what you're up to, Winston. And your group of cohorts who show equal ire and disdain for The Powers That Be will soon be chastising you in your absence.

Everyone's a Clean Up Hitter

I got a friend. I'll call him Barry. Calls once in a blue moon. Bullshits about getting together (for 3 years now). Then silence for 6 months. Repeats the process. I should have figured it out long ago. He's a Clean Up Hitter. He's Babe Ruth. Not Pete Rose. Or at least he's trying to be. Clean up hitters typically swing for the fences. Or strike out big. That is their job. While America has had their fair share of clean up hitters, for the most part, this country was built by blue-collar folks, singles and doubles hitters. Pete Rose. Steady employment. Bigger and better paying jobs as they reeled in the years. Vacation home on the lake. Pensions like clockwork. Of course, all that is gone now. No one can create steady, consistent wealth anymore. Recurring expenses today vs recurring expenses in 1970 resembles the 1995 wait list at Jerry Sandusky's Football camp vs the 2012 wait list. We got huge mortgages, increasing property taxes, iPhones for our toddlers, Panameras, Aspen timeshares, LandRovers for the Mrs. Parochial school tuition. Live-in maids. $500 Lacrosse camp fees. But with real wages stuck at 2000 levels, you're almost as poor as when you chugged a few Milwaukee's Best and capped it off with a couple of $0.59 Chilitos at Taco Bell back in the college days. So you have two choices: Try to build something slowly, while all your expenses continue their boner-like trajectory, or swing for the fences. Try to get rich by sundown. In the meantime, fake it till you make it. Keep going to those Chamber of Commerce meetings. Keep printing those $10 batch of biz cards. Schmooz. Network. Follow-up. Be Persistent. Your expenses certainly are. Now dig in. Snarl at the pitcher. Squint so you can see the fences. And swing like a lumberjack. Strike one. Thats ok. You miss 100% of the shots you never take. Strike two. Its ok. Tough times don't last. Tough people do. Strike three. FFFUUUUUCK!!!! You should have gone to medical school. Back to Barry. See, he's swinging for the fences. Got no long-term plan. None of us do. Only short-term hopes and aspirations. Thats why he calls me. To see what he can get in on at the last moment. Try to ride someone else's gravy train. Try to get the scoop from me. Thinks he's big shit because he knows some guy on the Board of Directors. "Hey, lets get together for a beer". Only to realize, for whatever reason, he ain't getting the scoop. There is no scoop. He's checking out. He'll call again in 6 months or so, wanting to drink more beer, but really trying to see if he can hit a HR. Little does he know, I'm behind on the count 0-2. Steeeee-Ryke!!!!!

Stick Around -- It Gets Worse (Or "The Hour Late")

"But you and I have been through that,
And that is not our fate.
So let us not talk falsely now,
For the hour is getting late."

-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

Let us at least be honest with one another.  After the Neo-Nazi-Cons defrauded the U.S. into a decade-long Iraqi misadventure -- to the tune of over $2 trillion, according to one Brown University study -- the Middle East is now worse than ever.  As if that was even possible.  Yet true to their seemingly inimitable ability to tamper in anything -- matched perhaps only by their mastery of wreaking death, destruction and discord, they are back.  Yes, they are back.

In 2002, when George W. Bush began hatching the Neocon plan to invade Iraq -- an invasion not just without justification, but without any perceivable national interest at all -- many drowned-out voices pointed out what later became inevitable.  Saddam Hussein was installed by the West.  You can repeat this fact to most of the flag-waving, chest-beating hoi polloi in America, and they won't even deny it.  But somehow it goes immediately down the memory hole.  Their brains switch channels back to the Newspeak of the day.  Utterances come back attempting some kind of purported justification, but it only makes you shake your head.  There is no answer, yet they still attempt one.  Mind reversion to radio pilot mode.

And not only was Saddam Hussein installed by the West, he was acting on their orders.  He was put there to hold a lid down on all of the ethnic and religious internecine tension that was forestalling the bloodiest most hellish of civil war.  It has been that way in the Middle East since time immemorial.  And there were never any laws visited upon the place long enough for any secular and national and transnational identity to take root.  The institutions were soon undermined by the need to keep the people down and continue to siphon that most precious of natural resources right from beneath their feet.

Couple that with what no American wants to hear and what only few can admit:  The West was using the people in that region for a half-century, literally stealing the greatest wealth of natural resources in history, flowing out easily in a black goo, to create a Western Christian, ultra-powerful society.  And the Have's in this game were keeping evil dictators in place with a very small share of the wealth and with arms to keep their people face-down.  Yes, you read that right.  These poor people's own natural resources were being used to put them in the position of the Have-Nots.  And they weren't happy about it.  Not one bit.

So all of those voices back in 2002, all of those voices telling the Chimp not to invade because there was no interest and no justification were also telling him that there was no end game.  Once the lid was lifted, once Pandora's Box was opened, all of the demons and hellish angels dwelling in those ancient ethnic and religious hatreds would be unleashed.  There would be the unraveling of what little nations were there.  It would be de-evolution of civilization on a cosmic scale.

And it would spread.  There would be not just the localized rivalries.  There was also the hatred that had been brewing and festering for decades.  Those people who had their oil taken from them -- oil that could have made them the Have's, if indeed they were not really the Have's all along.  And the wealth transfer that took place from the Middle East to the West was the actual reversing of the roles of the Have's and the Have Not's -- and all by virtue of calculated, ruthless Supremacy and Imperialism of the worst kind.

So let us not talk falsely now.  There is no need to make up new acronyms for the latest terrorism bugaboo.  You and I have been through that, and that is not our fate.  When we look closely, we know.  And the hour is, indeed, getting late.

The Good Old Days

Today, the Wall Street Urinal published an op-ed piece about how the U.S. economy is now the "well-educated barrista economy," apparently mocking the fact that highly-educated Americans have been relegated to becoming coffee-servers to make ends meet.

The wage structure of the entire economy has shifted downward since the Great Recession, and young adults trying to start careers and families have been the principal, but hardly the only, victims.

All of that to say that you, as an American, are working in a more menial position.  You are overqualified for the work that you are having to do simply to feed yourself.

These developments are jarring. For the past generation we've been telling ourselves and our children that demand for higher-order skills is surging and that a college education is the key to the future. But recent research by three Canadian economists calls this proposition into question. Paul Beaudry and David Green of the University of British Columbia and Benjamin Sand of York University document a declining demand for high-skilled workers since 2000. In response, they say, "high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers, . . . pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force altogether." Well-educated baristas and unemployed high-school graduates are flip-sides of the same phenomenon.

But the "well-educated barrista" economy is simply one that is the result of globalization.  No longer are we working for international companies based in the U.S. that develop the Third World and bring wealth from outside the U.S. into it.  The capital no longer flows into the country.  Instead, those international companies hired workers in South or Southeast Asia to do the same job for less work.  They then re-located offshore or became global conglomerates with no real home in -- and no real loyalty to -- the United States. 

So the jobs left, and the capital that was flowing from outside the U.S. into it and its workers now flows from outside the U.S. to outside the U.S.  There is no longer a cushion of capital flowing into the U.S. and ubiquitously buttressing it as an economy and it as a society. 

The U.S. workers went from working for international corporations bringing wealth in to working in jobs within a segregated U.S. economy that simply shift wealth around.  There is no longer a positive movement of capital and wealth from outside into the U.S.  Jobs like being a "barrista" are the perfect example of this phenomenon.

And the standard of living of the U.S. has collapsed and will continue to do so.  If you can pay the same amount of money to workers in India that you can pay to workers in the U.S., those wage structures are going to support only the same standard of living.  Everywhere those wage structures exist will come into equilibrium as it pertains to standard of living.  No longer is the U.S. as a society and as an economy being buttressed over the Third World.  Instead, it has been overtaken.

Worse, these international corporations have the upper hand with the workers.  They can sell to the highest bidder for their services and employment.  This can mean relaxing regulations, worker safety, and environmental protections.  It can also mean that they even get away without paying any taxes. 

But the real problem with it all is that Joe Sixpack still can't seem to understand this sad state of affairs. Like the inmates sitting around Randle P. McMurphey, they simply cannot apprehend that they are being dispossessed.  Instead, Joe Sixpack rails against the Government.  As if it was the Government that somehow decided to subjugate him.  Still ignorant to Capital and what it demands, what it has wrested from him.  He does the bidding of the international corporations and Capital by attacking the only savior he has -- the Government.

Unraveling the Poltical Machine

"Tired of beating your head against the wall while Hoi Polloi bury you in the latest talking points they received during recent fellatio of the idiot box? 

Had enough of wading through the conspiracy of dunces and the tidal wave of imbeciles pawing at you like the Zombie Apocalypse? 

Fear not, and take heart, for the political machine stops."

--R. H. Maravelt

Just think about it for a minute.  You see the social media light up daily with the goings on of the dominant party -- lunches with the Republican Women's Forum and the Strepford Wives' Club. 

They're getting together with the latest candidates for office to vet them and sit in a modern parlor to go over that "God-awful" party of miscreants -- the "Blue" party -- those that threaten at the gates, as if it was Mordor and orcs beating on the walls of Minas Tirith -- the unwashed, the unsophisticated, the unmonied, the lower classes. 

On and on and on the social media and the pictures of those that suck the assholes of the purveyors and managers of the monied classes and Das Kapital.  And the shills, the toadies, the whores of the monied classes, like the sell-out prisoners who assist the oppressors in the concentration camps, smile and fawn and suck more and more out of their owners' assholes.  It would be amusing if it weren't just so amusing.

But the good thing is that the machine runs on fealty; it is no meritocracy.  Those who have made it to where they are by sucking the shit out of assholes are weeded out for being good at sucking the shit out of assholes.  They are sitting ducks for a cutting, intelligent, highly focused diatribe.  They are raw meat for the wolves of those who deserve but run hungry.  They are the sheep for the slaughter that they so richly deserve.

They are not intelligent.  They know not how to formulate argument.  Theirs is simply to re-post and to regurgitate and to re-echo in their echo chamber little simplistic idiocies that have been handed down to them. 

Wade into them.  Shoot them in the belly.  When you put your hand into a bunch of goo, that a moment before was your best friends face . . . you know what to do.

Marathons and Miranda Warnings

So it's really not that hard to figure out.  There is all of the evidence in the world convicting the 19-year old lying in the hospital bed with his mouth shot out.  There is no real need for a confession to get a conviction.  Which leaves the question, why not issue the Miranda warnings?

Well, the talking heads would tell you that it is all about seeking intelligence.  And then there's the word "radicalized."  Apparently, some individuals can become "radicalized," at which point they become a danger to society and possibly the target of a drone strike.

Or perhaps they are "enemy combatants."  The gay Senator from South Carolina couldn't wait to drop this one on you.  Now an American citizen, captured on American soil, apprehended and disarmed, could unilaterally be declared an "enemy combatant" and be damned anything having to do with rights.

It really was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen . . .  

The Perversion of the Notion of Freedom

Deconstructing the Right's fetish with the notion of "freedom" is an exercise of the absurd.  Hoi polloi  are white knuckled with a fear that their "freedom" is somehow being taken away.  But how can they be so easily taken?  The use of the notion of "freedom" is so bizarre that it cannot stand.

Freedom?  As if some poor bastard died in a war for your freedom?  Or was it for your government, that tells you that you have freedom?  Ah, yes.  When did we forget so suddenly that government cannot bestow freedom on men, only take that freedom away.