River of Fireflies

retirement

2011-05-22T11:57:00.001-07:00

This blog is in retirement.

Thanks for reading!

hobos of the skies

2010-07-19T14:05:00.000-07:00

"Steve Dennis brings us an in-depth look into the bizarre world of airline crews' sleeping arrangements, with the development that has been born of necessity: crash pads. Dennis tells us all about crash pads, how to find one, and even how to start one."

save the ozone by giving everyone cancer

2010-06-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a story that's flying below the radar even in California, much less the rest of the country, but that probably everyone should be aware of:

State poised to OK supertoxic pesticide (SF Chronicle)

"The California Department of Pesticide Regulation has proposed registering methyl iodide as a pesticide in California to the dismay of scientists and environmental groups, who say it is so toxic that even chemists are reluctant to handle it ... (it is) used in the laboratory to induce cancer cells."

"Methyl iodide is now licensed for use in 47 states, but it is expensive and used only sparingly in Florida and the Carolinas, mostly on strawberries and occasionally on tomatoes and peppers."

The EPA registered it back in 2007. Apparently it was over quite a bit of protest. That's not a lot of time for conclusive studies regarding effects on humans and use in soil, but the EPA signed off on it claiming they conducted extensive studies and found the toxicity level to be acceptable. From their summary:

The potential for iodomethane to cause cancer has been evaluated. The only evidence of carcinogenicity following exposure to methyl iodide was related to thyroid cancer, and was attributable to the effects of the chemical on thyroid homeostasis similar to what is seen with other non-mutagenic iodinated compounds. The dose-response for these effects was considered in the risk assessments, and the exposures expected from this use are well below those that would cause thyroid effects leading to cancer. Based on this evaluation, the Agency concluded that there are adequate safety margins and these endpoints do not pose risks of concern.

Uh huh. So, it only causes thyroid cancer. Well, that makes me feel better.

"Exposures expected from this use" is the line that really bothers me here. What is this "expectation" based on? What the agribusiness lobbyists who pushed for this promised would be the rate of exposure? The same people who hire untrained and under-equipped migrants illegally so they can make them work under horrible conditions off the books?

Uh huh. That makes me feel better too. Not even to mention if they pull some sort of a BP with it and there's massive air or groundwater contamination that reaches a nearby town.

If it's used only in fields dedicated to strawberries, tomatos and peppers, it's easy enough to avoid buying those known to be grown in Florida, the Carolinas, or if this passes, California. A little tougher when these things become ingredients in prepared foods - were the strawberries mixed into your smoothie grown with this stuff? Or the bell peppers in your Chinese food? You generally can't find that out. Not to mention, the only quality, cheap source of veggies for a lot of urban dwellers anymore is at farmer's markets - what happens if all the local farmers decide to start using this stuff? You don't get to eat tomatos, peppers or strawberries anymore?

It seems insane to use something with this much risk simply for the sake of the environment - there has to be something much more skeezy going on in the background here. Public commentary ends on June 29. There's a pre-fab comment form that can be found here.

the modern Billy the Kid

2010-05-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

I heard about this guy on the TV news a few days ago for the first time, but apparently the most recent Rolling Stone has an article on him:

Colton Harris-Moore, the barefoot boy bandit, outfoxes sheriffs (link goes to Times Online UK)

From the article:

"Police say 18-year-old Colton Harris-Moore, whose escapades are turning him into a folk legend, is a one-man crime wave, responsible for 50 burglaries as well as stealing light aircraft, which he taught himself to fly from video games, and several speedboats."

"He lives in the woods, shuns shoes and catches his own food. His only technological aid is a pair of thermal-imaging goggles to hunt at night and his weakness is pizzas, which he asks to be delivered at the edge of the woods."

Sounds like he wants to live out a real life version of Grand Theft Auto, just without the hooker killing and gang wars. I'm assuming that's why he's becoming so popular too - tapping into that same sort of desire for freedom and power that hyper-centrally-controlled industrial-capitalist culture takes away.

Anyway, he has a Facebook fan page, naturally.

Liberal Apple lovers, take note

2010-05-02T16:58:00.000-07:00

I understand the appeal of Apple's products. They're simple. They come in a sleek, slick package and do what you expect them to do out of the box, with a nice user-friendly interface. People often cite them as being more stable and safer as compared to PCs, but that's not true. That's only true if you run Windows and have no idea what you're doing. Even running Windows as my primary OS, on various PCs over the last twenty or so years, I very rarely have crashes, malware, viruses or meltdowns. That's because I took the time to thoroughly learn how a PC works when I was younger, and I've at least modestly kept my skills and knowledge up over the years.

The computer is a complex thing, and Apple simplifies it and makes it more convenient. They also do great marketing. They've managed to convince liberal, greenie, progressive, Berkeley etc. types - who normally hate on massive multinational corporations - that they are a swell bunch of folks whom it is great to throw money at. Primarily this is because Apple's marketing really seems to understand the modern urban yuppie sensibility. I'm not saying that everyone that uses Apple/Mac is a yuppie, or clueless about computers and too lazy to learn. There's plenty of smart and cool folks - readership of this site included - who go Mac just because it fits what they do better or it has software that they prefer that other platforms do not. But you have to admit, Apple primarily markets at yuppies. All of Apple's products come in sealed molded plastic cases that they really don't want you to take apart and wrench yourself. They also idiot-proof their OSes to the point where you're limited in your freedom and customization of it. Only yuppies think that sort of thing is preferable to a PC, which you can take apart and swap out individual components and do whatever is in your capability with. Yuppies have the disposable income to simply hand their unit back to Apple along with a $200-300 "repair fee" whenever there's any little problem with it, yuppies also don't want to be bothered with much more than reading Huffington Post while downloading Arcade Fire albums. So Apple works for them.

And then there's the whole Cult of Apple thing, which goes even further. This taps into some mythology/tribalism/religion thing that I can't say I even fully understand. But I get to see a lot of it, since Apple usually does their big yearly product unveilings here in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. You literally can't get a hotel room in the city the week they do these things, everything is booked solid short of the crackhouse SROs. When the iPod first came out I guess it was a little exciting. It wasn't the first portable MP3 player, but it was the first truly pocket-sized one that had a really user-friendly interface. I used to have an Archos Jukebox back in the old days, believe me, the iPod was night and day. But since then they haven't introduced anything really new, just nifty versions of existing technology. People go through this whole ritual though, where Steve Jobs comes out in his skinny jeans and slowly produces some little object with an LCD screen while grinning, and people stand in lines literally for blocks to catch a glimpse of the holy artifact. That's a sub-culture of Apple users though, most of them aren't that hardcore into identifying with the company. But you dont see that sort of thing happen with any other technology company.

Anyway, there's a news item unfolding right now that I think liberal Apple lovers should pay attention to. I'm sure they already are, actually, but they aren't looking at it in the way that they should be looking at it, because no one I've seen so far is covering it from the right angle.

I'm talking about the lost (NOT stolen) iPhone 4 prototype, that a boozy Apple engineer left behind in a bar while field-testing it. A kid who was drinking next to the guy found it, apparently tried to return it and wasn't taken seriously, then sold it to Gizmodo for $5,000. This all happened between March 18-April 18, Apple's legal team sent a letter requesting the return of the phone, and Gizmodo complied.

Now here's the interesting part. A week after the return of the phone, the editor of Gizmodo's house was raided by a special "computer crimes" police team, who seized all his computers. This came about due to Apple contacting San Mateo police about the incident.

Now, here's the word on California's "samaritan law" on lost property from CNet news - because apparently there is one:

"Under a California law dating back to 1872, any person who finds lost property and knows who the owner is likely to be but "appropriates such property to his own use" is guilty of theft. If the value of the property exceeds $400, more serious charges of grand theft can be filed. In addition, a second state law says any person who knowingly receives property that has been obtained illegally can be imprisoned for up to one year.

Is it possible a law was technically violated here? Yeah - a law from 1872 that's probably outdated as all hell and was completely forgotten until now, but yeah. And then there's the issue of the guy who found the phone's attempts to contact Apple, and whether they constituted a fully reasonable attempt to return the property or if he could have done more. The greater issue, however, and the one that's not being covered, is whether you or I would have our lost property treated the same way if we called it in to the police. Would we get a special SWAT team to search the house of the person that we thought was holding it? Of course we wouldn't. But Apple does, simply because they are a massive multinational.

And what was the need? The phone had been returned. Whatever damage might have been done to Apple's product launch had already been done. This is pure retribution, Apple whipping out their dick and saying "Yeah, we can give marching orders to the cops. Don't fuck with us."

The classy thing for them to do is simply take responsibility, since the whole incident began with their dumbass engineer dropping the phone in the first place. And, Christ, whatever financial losses they might incur - if any at all - are hardly going to break the company's back. This is one of the richest companies in the world, with a whole range of products. They got the phone back, that should have been the last we ever heard about it right there.

There is absolutely no purpose to this move by Apple except to say "Look at us, look at what we can do, we own your asses. Don't fuck with us, peons. Keep buying our shit and shut your mouths, you soft little yuppie bitches. This is America, giant corporations are in control here. Be fearful."

Kinda in conflict with the whole liberal, greenie, Berkeley playbook, huh?

UPDATE: I did find one article that at least questions whether Apple overstepped their bounds - on Yahoo of all places:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20100429/bs_nf/73064

Great Moments In The Tenderloin # 14

2010-04-17T11:58:00.001-07:00

The scene: I'm in a little cafe in the blurry TenderNob area, getting a little quality online time in with a shakey shake.

Dude rolls in in a nice motorized wheelchair, looks partially paralyzed, has nifty custom flame decals on the seat.

He goes up to the counter and orders something that requires the barista lady (the only one working) to go into the back for a minute to get something.

While she's gone, wheelchair dude asks another dude who is standing nearby stirring his coffee to reach into the refrigerator for him and grab him a can of Coke. Other dude thoughtfully complies.

Wheelchair dude stuffs the Coke can into his bag, turns around, and just rolls out of there without paying.

Lol Stephen Hawking dudes jacking Cokes bold as hell.
Lol Tenderloin, don't ever change on me.

restoring cavities?

2010-04-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

Just poppin' in to share a link today ...

Interesting link on tooth recalcification/repair and a lot of good comments to sift through -

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/03/reversing-tooth-decay.html

dwelling portably

2010-04-03T11:24:00.001-07:00

I just happened across a site that I added to the sidebar links (over there >) that I thought was worth highlighting with a post. Aside from having a really helpful and informative website for people in the sorts of living situations that most of my readership are in, the authors of Dwelling Portably have been cranking out a zine for the last 3 decades encompassing tips, tricks and practical knowledge on the general life of low-budget nomads and Hobos. The cool thing is that they sell compilations of each decade in book form online for seven bucks each. I'm planning on picking up the most recent anthology, which was for 2000-2008, as soon as I have a stable mailing address to send it to!

interesting human interest story

2010-02-11T20:39:00.000-08:00

Millionaire gives away fortune which made him miserable (Daily Telegraph, UK)

"It was the biggest shock in my life, when I realised how horrible, soulless and without feeling the five star lifestyle is," he said. "In those three weeks, we spent all the money you could possibly spend. But in all that time, we had the feeling we hadn't met a single real person – that we were all just actors. The staff played the role of being friendly and the guests played the role of being important and nobody was real."

He had similar feelings of guilt while on gliding trips in South America and Africa. "I increasingly got the sensation that there is a connection between our wealth and their poverty," he said.

favelas in Brazil

2010-02-08T11:51:00.000-08:00

Quite often, when I'm researching something online, I happen across pages that are unrelated yet interesting. I tend to just bookmark those and come back to them later, so I don't get distracted from whatever's at hand, and then I end up with this huge list of bookmarks in Firefox to work through at some point when I'm bored, sometimes stuff that I can't even remember how I found or why I bookmarked it.

I don't remember how I found this blog exactly, but I do know I bookmarked it because it introduced me to the favelas of Rio De Janeiro - apparently ungoverned slum areas in the city that are either run by organized crime or not at all. As the linked blog puts it, "If something got done it was because one person decided it. If someone wanted a roof to live under, he or she didn't ask permission. And when someone wants to help people living in favelas, they take matters into their own hands."

Kowloon Walled City is a longtime subject of fascination to me, as you might know, and you can see a lot of parallels here - a sort of autonomous, poverty-ridden zone where people form their own community without government intervention. Unlike KWC, which was torn down in the early '90s, the favelas are apparently still existent and thriving.

I don't have anything original to contribute on the subject as I'm just beginning to look into it, and I'm not doing serious research for any particular purpose, just out of curiosity. I thought I'd share some links though in case anyone else finds these little self-organized pockets in the midst of Centrally Controlled Industrial Society equally interesting. Wikipedia has a good comprehensive page to start out with, with a lot of good links at the bottom. Here's a good story/essay from an expat who lived there. And here's a good essay examining the favelas from the perspective of being an anarchist autonomous zone.

good jorb democratic overlords

2009-12-18T19:53:00.000-08:00

Just a personal perspective, for whatever it's worth ...

As a military vet who makes an extremely low income, the VA covers the majority of my health care needs at no cost - pretty much everything short of dental and vision.

If that went away somehow, I'd also be eligible for Healthy San Francisco, a program that offers a similar level of care at low to no cost at city hospitals for those of us that have little money here.

And then there's a slew of free clinics - a time-consuming and not always pleasant atmosphere, but for the most important basic stuff, it's reliably there.

What happens if this health care overhaul goes through as it sits now?

Honestly, I'm not sure, because apparently they're set to vote on it yet haven't released all the details somehow. Frankly, I'm too exhausted from finals to look into it further.

But I've seen enough to indicate that I'd basically be expected to pay a fairly large chunk of money yearly for private health insurance, or the government would fine me. I *might* qualify for some kind of unspecified subsidy. Again, all very vague at this point, yet it's *this* close to becoming law.

If this happens? Obama has stated publicly that he doesn't intend to touch VA care. He's made promises he hasn't lived up to before, but I think he'll actually keep this one, because the potential political shitstorm from denying returning Iraq and Afghanistan vets proper health care is too epic to risk.

But let's pretend for a second I'm not a vet. I never did a tour on active duty and thus, am your standard civilian hobo with only a string of irregular low-wage jobs to my name.

Healthy San Francisco will likely stick around, since it's large and well-organized and pretty well-funded. It'll probably be scaled down, but it'll provide some kind of a safety net to all the poor people that fall between the private insurance cracks.

But let's say I don't live in San Francisco. Wealthier counties and cities have programs like this, but no one (that I know of) nearly as comprehensive or well-organized, and maybe they lean on federal funding that isn't going to be there anymore, because Hey, we Reformed Health Care.

Free clinics? Another questionable funding situation. They continue to exist, but are already underfunded and overburdened - how much worse does it get if the We Reformed Health Care rationale is employed to cut their city/state/gov't funding further? Do some of them go away? This is not even to mention the many parts of the country where they either barely or don't exist to begin with (again, a fringe benefit of being poor in the wealthy Bay Area)

So let's say I'm the working poor, and I'm not a vet. I could get health care before, but now the new Dem plan mandates that I pay anywhere from 1/6 to 1/2 of my yearly income to a private insurer. If they use the Federal poverty line as it sits now to establish eligibility for subsidy - and I imagine they will, because what other bureaucratic tool is available? - and don't consider elevated cost of living in coastal areas and big cities and resort areas, all sorts of poor people are going to end up not eligible for subsidy yet expected to pay just as much as anyone else.

The point of all this?

The new plan, in essence, ends up taking away low-income coverage that was imperfect but adequate in many cases, and then reaching into those same people's pockets and mandating they pay a massive yearly tribute to the insurance industry.

So, the checklist so far:

* Incredible amounts of public money handed over to banks with little oversight and trust that they would "do the right thing" with it - the "right thing" to them being hoarding it up, not loaning it to small businesses, and using the failure of smaller banks to acquire them and thus become an even wealthier, more powerful socio-political force.

* Pretty impressive amounts of public money handed over to the auto industry, an outdated and largely unnecessary industry that does more net harm than good

* Commits to further foreign war for years. Then has the giant brass nuts to not only accept a Nobel Peace Prize but to make a speech making excuses for committing to war.

(This is just the stuff that has to do with the Federal budget and distribution of public money, btw. Oh, there's more.)

The point of all this?

You know who's been the most helpful politician to me, as an impoverished and homeless person in America?

John "Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran" McCain.

You know why?

It was his support that was the tipping point to get through the new Post-9/11 Montgomery GI Bill - on Bush Jr.'s watch under a still-Republican Senate.

Without that bill, I'd either have to take out something like $20,000 in student loans to attend the (very modestly priced) upper division college I currently do ... or I would have had to stop at a community college associate's degree and not continue on to a bachelor's, because there's no way I could have done it without going into massive debt.

Funny old world, huh?

object lesson - why hackers are fail

2009-11-03T20:32:00.000-08:00

I seem to dog on Ran Prieur sometimes in this blog so I thought I'd give him some support today :)

Ran's recent experience with Hacker News puts me in mind of why I almost wholly severed myself from the "hacker" community years ago. "IT nerds" in general - computer geeks - share an almost universal experience from what I've seen, and it's my hypothesis that that social/cultural experience is what both fucks them up emotionally and then sends them all down a very similar political/social path.

To get into computers, first of all, you have to be introverted and maybe even a little ADD. Definitely socially awkward and on the "geekier" side of town. If you possess these qualities, you likely were picked on and made to feel like an outcast while growing up. If you devoted the massive amounts of time in front of a glowing screen required to be a good enough hacker/IT guy to go out and do it for a living in the real world, you also likely missed out on a lot of socialization, further reinforcing the isolation, outcast status, etc.

If you experienced this, you likely carry a lot of anger and pain. People who stick with IT/computers/hacking into their adult years assuage that by telling themselves they are "special" and "powerful" and "superior", because they generally get paid pretty well, and their skills are in demand in the capitalist market as it presently exists. They then mentally take revenge on all the "dumb jocks" and everyone else who tormented them in their youth by putting themselves in an elite mentality based on their technical skills, based on the fact that they make good money, and based on the fact that they can usually do things that make them feel powerful like cracking into other people's email accounts and servers.

All of this feeling of elite status, exceptionalism and power is predicated on the existence of the computer, the infrastructure required to both create them in mass quantites and make them affordable. Thus, they defend the status quo - at least in that sense - to the death. This is why they tend to be hardcore libertarian free-marketeers and capitalist abuse apologists, which you'll see a lot of in the linked comments thread. You'll also see a lot of belittling and ridicule of anything that they percieve as threatening their power arrangement - again, a lot of that present in the comments thread, mostly in the form of quick straw-man dismissals.

In sum - IT/computer nerd/hackers = a lot of flabby, pasty, severely emotionally damaged Fail. They're very intelligent, but not very WISE. Their thinking when confronted by arguments of the nature of Ran's is something like - "This is a threat to me, because if these ideas were accepted widely they'd shake up Things As They Are, which I've completely adapted myself to and have some petty power share in, and without that I'd have to both confront the fact that I'm not good for anything except being technical support for a widespread system of abuse and exploitation, and also confront my own emotional issues in an honest way rather than hiding behind this construction of Powerful Rugged Technology Man that I've built up in order to avoid them. So I'm going to immediately shut my mind off and belittle and dismiss these arguments as quickly as possible, and I'll just ignore key points and commit logical fallacy if that seems to be the most expedient way to do it."

Of course, there's exceptions among "computer people", but ... well, they're called "exceptions" for a reason.

sometimes a punk bitch is just a punk bitch

2009-09-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

It's officially time to stop apologizing for Obama.

He's a chump. He's either that, or he's been a tool of the elite from the beginning. Either way, this stupid "BUT BUT BUT HE'S FACING HIDDEN DARK POWERS THAT ARE TOO STRONG" argument is a waste of everyone's time. It's time to admit the guy is either principled but too weak/incompetent to do any good, or he's been a tool from the beginning.

He's done nothing so far but deliver massive, unparalleled victories into the hands of Wealth and Power. I know Bush initiated the bailouts, but Obama and his economic team kept it going and spurred it forward and now the big banks are even bigger and richer and have more power than before. And what was this "Cash For Clunkers" shit? A perpetuation of toxic car culture to serve the sole benefit of propping up an unnecessary industry while probably doing more environmental damage than good.

Even if he really isn't an "evil elite" at heart, what the hell good is he if he does nothing but cave to them on every front?

Update:

He didn't take the public option off the table as expected, but then he also didn't make any specific commitment to it ... that's not the worst thing that could have happened but it still isn't really meaningful.

Great "You better zip that mouth up honky" moment though:

I'm still not impressed by the speech, though. It highlights the major problem so far with Obama - he's careful to say what "progressives" want to hear, but at the end of the day, Giant Industry winds up being the ones winning out on everything.

Detroit Crop City

2009-08-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

"Contemporary Detroit gave new meaning to the word “wasteland.” It still stands as a monument to a form of land abuse that became endemic to industrial America—once-productive farmland, teaming with wildlife, was paved and poisoned for corporate imperatives. Now the city offers itself as an opportunity to restore some of its agrarian tradition, not fifty miles from downtown in the countryside where most of us believe that tradition was originally established, but a short bicycle ride away."

Most of us who don't live in Detroit likely picture it now as basically the World's Biggest Ghetto, which in all likelihood great swaths of it actually are. The linked article reveals fascinating complexity to the place at present, however, especially when you consider it with other recent activity by artists and home-based businesses and crafters who have moved in to neighborhoods there in a coordinated effort to take advantage of the extremely low home prices and form new communities.

Detroit is definitely the United States' largest and highest-profile example of the inevitable failure of centrally controlled industrial capitalism in terms of community. The city's "glory years" were built upon an industry that was excessive, bloated, never completely necessary, and reliant on mindless consumption to sustain it long after the point that it met what legitimate necessity there was. Inevitably it became unsustainable and too top-heavy and it, along with most of the Rust Belt, collapsed into this morass.

The fascinating thing now is what will happen to it from here, because this will be dictated entirely by the will of the people who occupy it unless Corp-Gov very forcibly intervenes. Thus far their Eye of Sauron has been elsewhere on other matters, and the people of the area have made only a modest start thus far at self-sufficient community. But they now have cheap/free housing en masse, lots of space to work with, and are beginning to set up their own independent food supply. They are awfully close - excitingly so for us, frighteningly so for the Orcs - to meaningfully extricating themselves from the control system.

We know that The Auto Industry is not coming back, at least not in any meaningful way to the working people, though politicians on both sides of the Spectacle will continue to lie about that for years to come I am sure. With pollution and all the other toxic byproducts of "car culture", we really don't want it to anyway, in the long and broad social view. Corp-Gov has thus largely abandoned the area since there is nothing left for them to exploit.

What is interesting here is both what actually happens, and what the media chooses to portray as happening. I am fairly certain that the media will be vested in portraying Detroit as descending into armed, gangbanging niggaism in the absence of shopping malls and the well-paid police forces that go with them, which is the lie it wants you to believe about all urban communities (and really just another revision of the "red in tooth and claw" argument used to justify elite control and selfishness for hundreds of years now.) It may perhaps even do so, but these recent articles indicate to the contrary, and a local message board I found while doing a little research on the state of gang activity in Detroit has some comments that tend to support my assumption that drug gangs there are both not all that big and organized (due mostly to lacking market), and that they also have no interest in actually running some sort of ghetto fiefdom, nor do they have anywhere near the competence or ability to do so even if they did have the interest. But I think this is the lie the Mass Media will try to tell us as the city struggles to heal itself and become self-sustaining. Perhaps it will try to ignore it altogether, which is all the more reason for us to pay attention.

disabled anonymous comments

2009-08-15T10:25:00.001-07:00

sorry, had to disable anonymous comments due to some random rash of Chinese spam.

The Economy as religion

2009-08-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

I took a Macroeconomics 101 class last semester. I was struck by how much of dominant "economic theory" was to be taken simply on faith when you got right down to it, how often the ultimate answer to a question was "we can't really be sure of that", and how seemingly needlessly arcane all the laws and rules of it were. I was also struck by the priest-like presentation of the material by the instructor, and the dogmatic, unquestioning following of it all by most of the rest of the class (most of these being career-minded business and economics degree seekers, thoughts undoubtedly centered only upon their future Success and Salaries.)

In sum, the narrative/mythology of the Economy that we live under is something like this - it is a Mystery beyond your understanding; however, the (well fed) Priests will Interpret the Signs and Sigils for you, and if you do your obsequience and observe the Rites and the Ways closely, you will be Rewarded, and the God will not bring down his Wroth upon you to take from you your home, car and livelihood. And yea, those that interpret the Signs and Sigils the most attentively will be rewarded the most handsomely.

In many ways, the Economy seems to me to be the modern Religion of the state. I was certain that this was a fairly evident concept and had been explored by someone or another in great detail, but a cursory Googling of the phrases "economy is the new religion" and "economy as religion" turned up surprisingly less than a page of results each.

This is basically just some random guy kind of rambling in a blog post, but it raises numerous points worth considering.

Here's another blog post that really just links to an article entitled "A Rich Man's World" by Jeremy Seabrook. The link in that post seems to no longer function, but I Googled up one that does work. As it turns out it is just a fairly standard pro-government-legislation/intervention manifesto, which doesn't go where I expected or wanted it to, but it does offer this fairly good tidbit in that general direction:

"The economy now has to be treated with a veneration long lost to mere religion. It is anthropomorphised, the object of a tender concern of which people have ceased to be recipients: is it sick or healthy, does it need an injection or a shot in the arm, is it suffering or slowing down? It is as capricious as a prima donna, volatile and unpredictable, subject to bouts of brooding and uncertainty. It is also a semi-sacred phenomenon, which must be read for signs and portents. It must be propitiated and sustained, treated with an awe and respect which humanity forfeited long ago.
Indeed, humanity has become something of an intrusion into the majestic workings of the global economy. We are all abject postulants before its ability to deliver the goods, to yield dividends, to perform miracles and lay golden eggs. This is why "human nature" is so important to the idealists of the infinitely perfectible economy. The only flaw in an infallible universe is a faulty, unregenerate, indeed, fallen humanity. In this way, the holy mysteries of the economy are at one with the Christianity of which the economy is the deformed and wayward offspring."

A Google Book search turned this up, but it really seems to content itself with superficial connections to rites and celebrations, and doesn't go (to my thinking) to more meaningful depths. It is also written in "academeise", that needlessly dense and obtuse language that gives me cause to not trust the author upon sight.

I can't possibly be the first to explore this concept in this way. Can anyone out there recommend any writing on the subject?

the world's most advanced police state marches on

2009-08-02T09:45:00.000-07:00

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/08/02/0725224/UK-Plans-To-Monitor-20000-Families-Homes-Via-CCTV

You may wonder why I post about Britain here so often. I think it's a fine reminder for those of us not there that this sort of thing not only can happen but is happening right now.

who goes brownshirt?

2009-06-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting link I saw the other day, from Ran Prieur's site -

Who Goes Nazi? by Dorothy Thompson

A columnist from 1941 goes to an upscale sort of dinner party in America and speculates about the personality types that will join up with Nazism if it became a popular movement in America.

It's slippery to try to extrapolate this sort of thing to modern times, not for the least reason of which that it involves Nazism which is now pretty much the most reviled movement in human history. But if you look at the personality archetypes the author describes you'll see a lot of parallels to the sorts of people that inhabit the "bridge and tunnel", downtown office, Financial District set of the modern urban existence.

Do I think all people who work in a downtown office and wear a suit to work would "go Nazi"? Oh, no, but I think if a suitably competent and charismatic populist and strongly Libertarian public figure emerges as a challenger in the 2012 or 2016 Presidential elections, and if the Obama adminstration continues to be perceived as doing nothing except making pretty speeches, we may well see a new and powerful brownshirt political movement (centered around geopolitical isolationism and "weeding out" the poor and "non-contributors" to the fascist economy as it is now) emerge within the next few years. I've always maintained that the prophetic dystopian novel is not 1984 but It Can't Happen Here and I see potentiality for that sort of thing shaping up more than ever among the Bridge and Tunnel Set, which makes this article an interesting read at this point in time - and, let's hope, nothing more than a fantasy intellectual exercise.

murder is a matter of perspective

2009-06-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

Judge rules that BART cop who shot Oscar Grant had no reason to use lethal force and will face murder trial

This is an important case to pay attention to. If not for BART commuters filming this incident on their camera phones, Johannes Mehserle would likely have just gotten away with murder.

...

I don't automatically hate all police. I don't like most of them, though, and I certainly don't trust ANY of them until they go out of their way to give me reason to. What happened in court the other day illustrates why.

Four officers that were on the platform with Mehserle persisted in lying in an attempt to save him, even when widely-circulated video evidence was playing before, during and after their testimony that showed that they were just making shit up in a desperate attempt to cover for their comrade.

Police too often adopt this "thin blue line" mentality in America - their thinking is something like "My job is dangerous, I face scumbags every day, you citizens don't know how it is, so it's OK if we bend the rules here and there, and we all have to cover for each other no matter what." This thinking is what makes them as America's largest organized gang, and most dangerous.

Were it not for citizen video of the BART police actions posted on Youtube - a practice commonly banned in police states for just this reason - the court would have had to rely on the "expert testimony" of the "honorable officers" at the scene. And if that were the case, Mehserle would be walking right now. Hell, this would have never been a story in the first place.

you can stop the compulsive hand-washing now

2009-04-30T11:52:00.000-07:00

You know, right from the jump I found all this "swine flu" coverage obnoxious and sensationalistic, but now the ante has been upped for complete irresponsibility -

WHO has recorded only 7 deaths in Mexico due to swine flu - not the 152 being reported just about everywhere

The WHO claims it never put the 152 number forward. I can't even find a source for the number other than one media outlet just keeps copying it from another. You'd think SOMEONE would have went to the WHO for a direct quote by this point, however.

Way to completely fail at basic fact-checking, journalists.

a for anarchy

2009-04-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

A few posts back I mentioned the film version of V for Vendetta and how it gives you a confusing view of anarchy - here's an excellent interview with Alan Moore, original author of the V graphic novels, talking about his own views of anarchist philosophy (and how Hollywood stripped it out in favor of impotent indirect flailing against the Bush administration.)

This paragraph makes a particularly salient point about fear -

"This is one of the things about anarchy: if we were to take out all the leaders tomorrow, and put them up against a wall and shoot them—and it’s a lovely thought, so let me just dwell on that for a moment before I dismiss it—but if we were to do that, society would probably collapse, because the majority of people have had thousands of years of being conditioned to depend upon leadership from a source outside themselves. That has become a crutch to an awful lot of people, and if you were to simply kick it away, then those people would simply fall over and take society with them. In order for any workable and realistic state of anarchy to be achieved, you will obviously have to educate people—and educate them massively—towards a state where they could actually take responsibility for their own actions and simultaneously be aware that they are acting in a wider group: that they must allow other people within that group to take responsibility for their own actions. Which on a small scale, as it works in families or in groups of friends, doesn’t seem to be that implausible, but it would take an awful lot of education to get people to think about living their lives in that way. And obviously, no government, no state, is ever going to educate people to the point where the state itself would become irrelevant. So if people are going to be educated to the point where they can take responsibility for their own laws and their own actions and become, to my mind, fully actualized human beings, then it will have to come from some source other than the state or government."

People's fear of anarchy, I think, is the fear of having it imposed on them involuntarily - in other words, going about their lives as they are used to but suddenly the government is just magically "stripped away" somehow. This is where you get the argument that anarchy would devolve into the "biggest gang" ruling - or that anarchists themselves are the gangsters! Of course, the whole Fight Club, black hoodie, firebombing-throwing crowd doesn't help this perception at all, but intelligent anarchists know better.

The key to this fear is in the framing of people's thought about government, and in the nature of anarchist philosophy. Anarchy is the only social philosophy that attempts to implement itself by willful acceptance across the whole population. Take that in contrast to every other political-social system in history, which imposes itself either by trying to win a majority over to impose it on the rest of the population via the force of law, or simply by using violent conquest and fear. America is currently a mix of both, as are most Western democracies at present.

What people who fear anarchy fail to grasp about it most fundamentally, is that it is entirely based on willful agreement and cooperation. A society operating under anarchist principles would only be doing so because everyone in it had made a willful, informed decision to hold a social compact according to those principles! That makes it much tougher to implement than society-by-force, which simply has to scare you into compliance with the threats of pain, death, loss, incarceration, material deprivation and homelessness.

If you think about it, with very few exceptions (small and scattered widely across the globe), no human society since small-scale tribalism has ever operated in an anarchist fashion. All of them have been imposed and maintained by force, fear and threats somehow. We are thus fighting against literally thousands of years of conditioning of the human mind to accept top-down dominance as inevitable!

In accepting it as inevitable, it is not that people evaluate anarchy and dismiss it as a poorer choice, but that they reject it as something that they cannot even understand from their frame of reference! And this is where the real challenge lies in tactical implementation.

the zombie spectacle

2009-04-24T15:53:00.000-07:00

Ever feel the nagging need to read the Society of the Spectacle since it is always recommended as such an influential work by clearheaded thinkers, and yet the text itself is so needlessly dense and convoluted that you can't get through twenty pages without throwing it down?

Joe Bageant sums the bulk of it up here in three paragraphs:

"So how is it that we Americans came to live in such a parallel universe? How is it that we prefer such things as Facebook (don't get me wrong, I'm on Facebook too), and riding around the suburbs with an iPod plugged into our brain looking for fried chicken in a Styrofoam box? Why prefer these expensive earth destroying things over love and laughter with real people, and making real human music together with other human beings -- lifting our voices together, dancing and enjoying the world that was given to us? Absolutely for free.

And the answer is this: We suffer under a mass national hallucination. Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a "theater state."

In our theater state, we know the world through media productions which are edited and shaped to instruct us on how to look and behave and view the outside world. As in all staged productions and illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what supposedly represents reality. Non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras, as the American empire's cultural machinery weaves and spins out our cultural mythology."

Everett Ruess found?

2009-04-22T19:09:00.000-07:00

I'll assume that if you read a vagabondish blog like this you'll be familiar with/interested in the Everett Ruess story.

I happened upon the April/May issue of National Geographic Adventure at the laundromat last week and I noticed this story - I'm not sure if the website replicates the full article so, in brief, they believe they've found the remains of Everett Ruess buried in Colorado. Skeletal features match up with old photographs of him, and further DNA testing is underway. If it is him - which looks pretty likely at this point - he was apparently chased down, robbed and killed by a group of Ute Indians, and an old Navajo man who witnessed the attack from a high ridge buried the body because he was afraid discovery of a white boy on reservation land would bring massive Federal retribution on everyone there.

anarchist FAQ

2009-04-04T12:16:00.000-07:00

I've added a link to Infoshop's Anarchist FAQ to the sidebar. This is a very good and very thorough introduction to anarchist thought ... but also very dense, and (IMHO) it could stand to be edited and organized a lot better.)

I suggest taking several days to read it in small bits, with plenty of breaks ... also, click on questions that are immediately relevant to you rather than trying to take in the whole thing in sequential order from the beginning.

capitalism as rape

2009-03-29T12:56:00.000-07:00

I found this via a recent post by Ran Prieur; it's a pretty good metaphor to explain the fundamental problem with capitalist society to people who don't understand it.

"do as you please" versus "take what you want"

2009-03-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

In looking at the problem of building a better society from the tactical perspective, one of the greatest obstacles we face is fear - the fear of being free!

If you do not believe that an active program of mental conditioning is going on in our schools and our media, you are either not paying attention, in denial or so thoroughly conditioned yourself at this point that you can no longer discern what is real from what is illusion. We live in a highly repressive society, and I've spent the past ten years among those suffering most - low-wage earners clinging to shit jobs for survival, people who joined the military out of a sense of hopelessness and of lack of belonging, and the homeless. Most of these people do not, however, even perceive that they are being repressed, will scoff if the idea is raised ("America is the FREEST COUNTRY ON EARTH and THANK GOD I was born here!!!"), and become fearful and willfully complicit with Authority if you even raise the prospect - privately! - of removing the chains that keep them from being healthy, self-actualized, completely fulfilled and joyful human beings.

Part of this comes from the fear of material loss, worn into a people perpetually at the edge of losing everything and never having quite enough. Part of it is this long program of psychological conditioning initiated in the schools, spurred along by unwittingly complicit parents, and further reinforced throughout life by the constant blare of media. An aspect of this conditioning that I think it is vital to address is the fear-linkage specifically created between the concepts of autonomy and freedom and the specter of violent, chaotic mob rule. This is a link frequently made in our popular fiction and I believe in most cases it is done intentionally as propaganda.

First we need to discuss anarchism, because it is inevitably bound up in all this. The concepts of anti-authoritarianism and society without repressive hierarchy are fundamental to anarchist philosophy. Mostly, the practical ideas of creating, running and organizing a society along these lines have been drafted and developed by thinkers and writers identifying themselves as anarchist. Like it or not, we are presently stuck with the anarchist movement as the face of the struggle for freedom and the primary driving force in making utopia real in this world.

Anarchism is greatly misunderstood by those who have not taken the time to properly acquaint themselves with it, however, and that represents the vast majority of the American population. Largely this is due to intentional programming by those that Upton Sinclair referred to as the masters of the payroll, who " ... select our cultural diet with care and definite purpose." Two prominent examples from recent years jump out at me. One is the blockbuster movie "The Dark Knight" from about a year ago, which at one point identifies the actions of the Joker as "anarchist." This links the concept, in the uninformed mind, with violence, might-makes-right, insanity, sadism, and nasty things of that nature. While there are strains of anarchist thought that advocate varying levels of situational violence as a means to an end, the Joker as presented in this movie has nothing to do with even the most fringe of these; he is simply a crazed sociopath with no actual serious developed or articulated philosophy, and the invocation of "anarchism" by the writers indicates to me a conscious, gratuitous insertion (when has the Joker ever before expounded anarchist philosophy in any of the old Batman comics or cartoons?) intended to smear the concept in the public mind.

The other example comes a bit closer to being even-handed - though it is still grossly flawed in its own right. It comes from the 2005 movie "V for Vendetta." There's a point in the film where V elaborates a bit on the difference between the worlds of "do as you please" and "take what you want."

Taken by itself, this is a good and clear distinction between anarchism as it is ("do as you please"), and anarchism as the currently-reigning forces of repression and control portray it to invoke fear of it ("take what you want"). I would personally redefine "do as you please" simply as "the right to say no", because that is essentially what it comes down to. You have no right to force anyone to do anything else (most specifically, by any sort of legalized leverage via social apparatus enforced by the State through the gun barrels of military and the police), and you have the right, without exception, to say "no" to what anyone else asks (or demands) you to do. The present work system, for example, is clearly unfair and vastly out of balance in favor of the holders of capital, and you can say "no" to individual jobs, but you do not have the right to say "no" to the system as a whole on moral or personal grounds, or simply because you do not consent to having the bulk of what you produce stripped away from you for the purpose of enriching some unknown speculator in a remote location. If you say "no", you will most likely find yourself in the homeless shelters, where you will still be pressured to at least some degree to conform, and when you resist there you have no alternative but the street, and if you manage to set up a self-sustaining camp, the police will come along and bust it up and try to pressure you into either jail or the shelters, where the conformity ritual comes right back down on you again. There is no "opting out" of things as they are, and your compensatory power-share in the social order is one feeble vote in the occasional election, made increasingly pointless by unverifiable voting machines, business lobbying and a revolving door between the leadership positions of government, business and the military.

The writers of the script do not leave the concept at that, however, but muddy it up by having V attempt to create the world of "take what you want" as a means to an end to creating the world of "do as you please", thus undoing any credibility the concept may have been developing in the mind of the viewer (a calculated scene is later inserted where a man is shown robbing a convenience store prior to the word "anarchy" being invoked for the first time.) It also places the whole dynamic into a cartoonish situation of extremes with a blatantly fascist government nearly straight out of an Orwell novel, and a superhuman hero. The impression left on the otherwise uninformed viewer is thus something like, "If the Nazis take over, it's OK to blow stuff up so long as you have a masked Ubermensch on hand to lead you, but things nearly aren't as bad now as this movie seems to be so let's just focus on the explosions, whee."

This leads to two separate stories about central control and human nature - one from the forces of Organized Capitalism on the one side, which you get every day from a variety of channels, and one from Anarchism on the other, which you really have to take your own initiative to look for and sort out for yourself.

The story Organized Capitalism tells you is this - people are fundamentally irresponsible, reckless, dumb and self-centered, so hierarchy and central control are necessary, so that people will be saved from descending into the violent mobs of armed gangs they will inevitably become when left to their own devices. Plus, the other State-Control systems are always crouched with bared fangs at the border, so if you do not support us, one of them will come along and snatch you up through violence and then you'll be even worse off. So just be quiet and do what your Betters tell you, and if you're really good at conforming to our program, we'll pay you off with bigger and more entertaining toys and drugs, and given that human nature is such shit, this is really the best arrangement we can ever come up with.

The story Anarchism tells you, on the other hand, is this - People will, in the absence of central control, tend naturally towards sociability, and will much more often than not organize peacefully in the interests of mutual aid. This is supported by evidence of tribal systems all throughout history. We've never had a chance to do this in our lifetimes, and we don't know exactly what will happen when we do, but it must be better than the present arrangement, so this state of affairs should be effected as soon as possible (and the means of effecting it represent the various strains of anarchist thought, from violent revolution on one end to complete pacifism on the other end.)

From my own subjective experience, living at the bottom of the First World all my life, I believe the Anarchists are much more right, and that Organized Capitalism is peddling a pack of lies in order to maintain the extreme positions of power and privilege it has created for its stewards.

There is an "X" factor, however, that throws a wrench into the Anarchist story. That X factor is what I have described here - the prolonged, widespread, thorough state of mental conditioning that the generations raised under Industrialized Organized Capitalism have experienced, which have warped their natural tendencies to some degree.

While I do believe the evidence that indicates we incline towards mutual aid naturally, there is also clearly an inclination in most people to Obey and to Subjugate themselves to anyone bold and forceful enough that they demand it, or to anyone that manages to leverage any kind of a threat of pain or deprivation against them. When we were hunter-gatherers, I think there was much more natural resistance to this tendency. I think hundreds of years of authoritarian conditioning - going back even past the present Rule Of The Merchants back to the Rule of Kings, Priests and Emperors - have drawn out that tendency to submissiveness in most people, and I think that, were they confronted with freedom on a broad scale today, they would simply run immediately back to what they are familiar with - namely, conformity, hierarchy and taking orders from the nearest Forceful Voice. It would thus take only a relatively small handful of exploiters, psychopaths and sociopaths - and we likely have more on hand on the Earth now than we ever have in history, thanks to a social apparatus that is set up to produce them - to ruin the whole thing and turn it into something worse than what it already is.

I think the wisest course of action, at present, is to slowly and gradually "downshift" through a more socialist democratic arrangement, with a focus on first of all ensuring the material needs of all are met adequately as a base condition of being a member of society. Given this state, it would be much easier to raise healthy people and give them the time and opportunity to study and learn on their own, which will lead greater numbers of them to become the sorts of people who have the requisite wisdom and inner balance to handle the responsibility of small, autonomous, self-directed community. Freedom from material want will also vastly improve the state of sociability, restoring our capacity for natural bonds with others and vastly correcting our present deplorable emotional and mental health. If we pull it off, in a few more generations, we might be ready. It could take much longer. But we do have the means in front of us to vastly improve our mutual lot, if not to create Utopia just yet.

We may not see the world of "Do As You Please" in our lifetimes, but I think that simply articulating it properly and giving people a clear vision to inspire them is a major step in the right direction.

the lolbama compromise

2009-03-20T18:34:00.000-07:00

I happened to catch this video clip of Obama addressing a room full of the global financial elite about a week ago while watching the evening news on PBS. I've been looking for it to appear on the Web somewhere, but no luck so far, so the next best thing is this article which summarizes the key points.

"I want you guys to do your thing,” Mr Obama said.

"“Our expectation is that we can use this moment to create a stronger free market system, one that’s more stable, one that’s more profitable over the long term.”

I put this forward just in case anyone out there still has illusions about who Obama is and what he is about. He is most definitely not "one of us".

Now of course, he has to say things like this or the people in that room (and the owners that they, in turn, serve) will have him killed. And the people in that room have to put up token resistance because that's part of the political script.

But the owners are actually happy with what he's doing, because it is as much as anyone can do right now. What he's doing is the New New Deal - a system of patchwork band-aids, whatever is minimally sufficient to keep the system of exploitation, domination and hierarchy going at terms acceptable to the elite who benefit from it, while paying off the masses in as low a coin as possible to keep them from rebelling and creating their own communities and micro-societies that withdraw from central control.

The prior New Deal, I suspect, was more calculated and much better planned out. This one is more of a "throw shit at the wall and hope it sticks", because I think they realize now that material resource depletion and the amount of things that can be monetized have butted up against an ever-growing world population that increasingly expects to live like they've seen the American middle class living over the past few decades, and that they really have no idea how to make this increasingly unsustainable situation continue working with everyone involved holding on to the levels of power and privilege they have become accustomed to. We don't have the threat of resistance from militant organized labor like we did back in the 1930s, and yet the elite and the politicos are even more panicked, because they now begin to fully grasp how close they are to completely losing control of the Mammon Machine.

Obama is not really a friend to you, in the sense of you becoming a fully actualized, fulfilled, joyful person living free from the specter of both violence and material want. Obama is a better option than the other clown that could have been in this seat, in that he's more willing to compromise with the people and grant them concessions than just step on them with the jackboot and desperately try to pick fights overseas in the hopes of rejuvenating the economy. But he doesn't have your best interests at heart, nice articulate guy that he may seem to be.

He didn't come up tied in with the elite, but as soon as he took that Oath of Office, he sure did become so. Look, man, no one who really wants to change the country for the better runs for President. People who want their names in history books run for President. People who really want life to change change their own lives.

The thing to take from all this is the idea that you need to begin acting in your own way. Other people will advise forming local connections, but I know from experience that isn't always possible. But at least get your mind clear and know all the traps that they set out for you so you don't keep blundering into them. And start at least letting this idea turn around in the back of your mind - "If I could build my own little village with my friends, what would it be like, and how would we make it work?"

spring cleaning

2009-03-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

It occured to me that the chronological archives that Blogger puts on the sidebar automatically are pretty useless, and have been taking up a lot of space now that the blog has been up for four years. So I tossed those down to the bottom of the page - in case someone does end up wanting to use them - and replaced them with links to posts that I think are more useful, or at least entertaining, to the sorts of people that will be coming through here.

This precipitated going back and reading the site archives, something I haven't done at all in about two years. It was an interesting exercise in seeing where I was at and where I am now.

I thought the 2005 entries would be uniformly immature and horrid, but as it turns out, the 2005 posts I thought were worth archiving - most prior to my becoming homeless - outnumber any other year by far! This may be a bit self-indulgent, but at the time my only real exposure to anything approaching a "radical" thinker was Fromm, and most of the concepts I was writing about I inuited pretty much through my own reasoning. They are common components of anarchist thought, but at the time, anarchism to me simply meant ugly red As in spraypaint and a bunch of scruffy punks creating a muddled philosophy to justify acting wild and stupid. I never took it seriously, or delved into it, until a little less than two years ago! The more I do, the more I find more clearheaded thinkers before me have already articulated everything that was dryer-jumbling around in my head somewhere or another.

At that time, when I set out into this "homeless" course I am on at present, my feeling was that I didn't really grasp the entirety of what was going on out there, but if I raised the sails on my little boat and pointed it in the direction I sensed was the right one, I'd make it through somehow eventually with a bit of navigational improvisation on the way. Now I feel more confident that that approach really is the proper natural way, or at least the way that works best for me.

2006 was a year of sloppy and largely useless writing, and there were a couple of posts that were so embarrassingly ignorant (and potentially misleading) that I "disappeared" them some time ago. Oddly, this was the year that the few long-term regulars who still visit hooked in to the site. There was a lot more comedy and silliness that year, however, and some of the comment threads are downright hilarious. I was in better spirits then than I've been since, even though I was by far more materially impoverished that year than I've ever been in my life. That was also the one year that I was almost completely away from the Big City. I think there's a connection.

(Oh, and as far as the line-by-line style I affected for awhile in 2005-2006; that wasn't really poetic pretension, except in certain cases, as it was my only computer access was at the city library for only one hour a day, so it was much easier to enter one thought at a time as one sentence than to form a tailored paragraph. I've since abandoned that style as I've acquired a laptop and nearly unlimited time on the internet, but it works pretty well for some things.)

2007 was a skimpy year - I think there were only about 20 posts or so total and none of them I felt were worthy of note. To be fair to myself, I did write the first edition of On Homelessness In America that year.

2008 was notably darker, more bitter, almost despairing at points (an ironic counterpoint to the exuberant advertising tropes of Hope and Change pumped into the environment all around us.) 2005 has almost a naive sweetness compared to last year. I'm much sharper and more disciplined than I was then, but I don't think I'm nearly as nice, and probably not as happy either. I'm glad that I caught that through this, because I now think I have an idea of what to do about it.

Next up - clean the Links list, which seems to be a bit longer than it should be.

yooman rights violations

2009-03-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

I don't want to be another in the chain of leftist establishment Daily Kos linkage, but I found the Yoo Doctrine (as summated in the John Yoo memos released on March 2 by the present administration, the relevant ones all linked on his Wikipedia page) to be worth examining for a couple of reasons. For one, it bulwarks my theory that the Bush administration had vastly greater plans for implementing a veiled dictatorship in America, and they only were checked because the old Cold War minds in charge failed to adequately plan for the exchange of information and ideas made possible by the internet. Of course, the elite are co-opting more and more of the internet daily for their own purposes, but they are still largely unable to control traffic on it to a great degree.

Yoo also illustrates how the new elite order works in terms of racial equality - the stereotypical Old Rich White Men may still own and control some 75 to 80 percent of the world's land and resources, but they are colorblind when recruiting their top generals and commandants so long as they hew to the approved ideologies.

Oh, and from the Wiki page -

Did someone add the "Master Po in Kung Fu" effect to this in Photoshop, or is he actually possessed by a demon?

why write?

2009-03-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

That is - writing, if you intend to do it well and effectively, takes up a tremendous amount of time. Time is very finite in human life, and we are surrounded by many problems and limitations wherever we are. So why spend time on writing, as opposed to, say, learning or practicing a useful skill, or engaging with your immediate community in some beneficial way? Not that these are mutually exclusive things, but the quantities of time absorbed by writing, and by the reading needed to become a better writer, could be used to do much in the way of progressing in these other endeavors of immediate concern.

The question of "why write" is bound up with another question that must be looked at first - "why live?"

The answer that our present society usually attempts to foist off on us is something of a mixture of "selfish gene" theory and the "enlightened self-interest" of market-based thinking - that we exist for our own self-interest and our own successful procreation, and that we should only "give back" as minimal an amount as we can get away with while seeking to maximize our own personal material benefit forever and without end. In sum, what society tells us is that we are inherently selfish and destructive creatures, stupid and weak unless we are led and directed in our living, and that for this leading and direction we need a hierarchy of "betters" who are somehow more capable or more knowing than we are.

Years of reflection and study have, of course, led me to disagree completely. My own personal answer to the question of "Why live?" is this - we do not really know "why" we are here in the universal sense, who put us here or to what purpose exactly, but we do know that the best moments of our lives are those in which we feel true joy and fulfillment. Thus, the sanest course of action for us all is to attempt to build a world in which we all have the capacity and the right to live in such a way. Building this society is best accomplished by living in accord with what the nature of the world we are in clearly intends for us, and that most effectively takes care of our fundamental human needs. This is most readily done in small-scale, tightly knit, self-sufficient communities, but ones that have far-reaching bonds that allow us to travel and communicate well with others anywhere and everywhere.

We have the capacity to build this world right now, but most of the world is not living in this way. The world labors under a variety of problematic social systems built on dominance, but the one we have here in America has become a global power center and a template that other systems have adopted for their own. This particular dominance system rewards the most pathological, sociopathic, the most amoral and efficient exploiters (your Rockefellers) and their coddled, witless offspring (your Paris Hiltons), giving them a vastly disproportionate share of material wealth and social power. It then goes on to create a tiered system of classes, with a relatively small class of upper-level and mid-level managers and bureaucrats who actually direct all the numerous operations and mechanisms that keep the privileged in their positions of privilege, and a much larger mass of laborers beneath them who are responsible for all the menial toil. Beneath even these are the effluence and the cast-offs of the system, the homeless, the criminals and various other unwanted - those that cannot or will not conform to the social mold as its masters intend it to be. All classes beneath the elite are controlled via a tiered system of bribery, mostly in the form of numerous opiates and distractions.

So, to get back around to the question of "Why write?", I refer to two quotes by the writer and poet Kenneth Rexroth that I carry with me always - "No wave motion ever dies", and, in reference to art in general, "After millions of well-aimed blows, someday perhaps it will break the stone heart of the mindless cacodemon called Things As They Are." In writing, we communicate what we have learned, and we set what we have figured out to the rest of the world to test for itself and to perhaps expand and grow. We could limit ourselves to quantifiable knowledge - recipes, instructions, technical specifics - and these are useful, but why move beyond these to grapple with ideas and abstractions that may consume much time yet turn out to bear no fruit whatsoever?

When we have found something that appears to be a useful truth, in that we feel in our bones that it may well be true, we can first of all sort it out far better for ourselves than if we limit our articulation of it to on-the-spot conversation. We can then send this idea out to the whole of humanity in a "wave motion" that transcends not just our geographical constrictions, but the constriction of our own mortality.

................

To speak for myself, my biological parents taught me nothing save what NOT to do in life. This happens with increasing frequency in centrally controlled societies as they slide down the slope of their inevitable decay. When one is in this situation one can find oneself being raised by a lot of things, most of them predatory and not in one's best interests. As things happened to work out, I was raised by writers, and most of these writers were long since deceased by the time I discovered them.

The first really major volley to crack my own "stone heart" came from happening upon Erich Fromm at a good time - chiefly, The Sane Society and The Art of Loving. Fromm is problematic for some people - he tends to simplify a little too much, he clings to the Judaism he was raised with, he has called homosexuality a "deviation". As for my own experience, The Art of Loving articulates a social problem incredibly well but leaves you with almost complete nonsense for a solution. However, at this point where I was in great pain and distress and grappling to understand why, having no guidance in life to that point but abhorrent capitalist culture and two right-authoritarian parents who preached subservience to it, Fromm was a lifeline to me.

Such writing pulls you from the sea, gives you a place from which to warm up and to orient yourself, and puts you in sight of the next vessel in the chain that will someday, you hope, lead you to your happy home. Even if the ideas are imperfect, so long as there is good solid truth in them, or the intent to seek it for the sake of all that is human, it is something worthwhile.

Some writers ultimately may mislead you, or give you something that is so appealing as to seem correct when it is not. Provided you do not sit still in complacency after taking them in, however, the test of constant exposure to new thought must always sort out the truth inevitably. I would like to write more on writers I have personally sifted through and left behind, but I think I will save that for another time.

the watchmen

2009-03-05T16:33:00.000-08:00

Hi Britain!

If any of you over there have been wondering exactly what it takes to slide you from joking references to Orwellian dystopia, to "holy shit this is real we are actually in a police state", guess what. The line has been crossed.

To paraphrase the famous American redneck - "When the police make it illegal to monitor their activity, yew might be in a police state!"

(Hi American media, thanks for sitting on this story for two full weeks prior to bothering to show it as an afterthought on PBS one random night in March)

an indefinite bark

2009-02-19T13:17:00.000-08:00

Due to lack of general interest + lots of other stuff going on that I view as way more important, An Honest Bark is on indefinite hiatus for being finished.

Of course, the core six chapters still and always will be available over at Cloud Bird Trail

hackerspaces

2009-01-28T16:18:00.001-08:00

A good resource to look into for the more tech-oriented hobos and vagabos out there.

the scientifically provable holographic universe?

2009-01-17T15:37:00.000-08:00

If you are interested in theories along the lines of Talbot's Holographic Universe, be sure to check out this recent Slashdot posting

don't fear the reaper

2009-01-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

Here's a quote from Irish author Tana French that I just saw by way of Bruce Schneier's blog -

"Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power -- governments, employers -- exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient -- not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you're doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you've persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you've indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process."

The quote continues, and here's the important part -

"The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who -- either because they're heroically brave, or because they're insane, or because they know themselves to be safe -- are free from fear."

That doesn't account for every possibility, and I comment on this because it is a major theme of my life and what I try to communicate.

I don't say this to brag or whatever, but personally, I am not afraid. I am certainly not heroically brave, nor am I safe from anything at all. "Insane" is debatable, largely being a subjective judgment, but I don't think this stems from lack of rationality.

I believe that this particular fear is an artificial psychological construct created by the society and the culture that we live in. As such, you can "un-train" yourself from it without being in any of the three extreme and relatively rare positions that the author lists.

We certainly have hardwired "fight or flight" responses - if a snarling mountain lion or bear jumps out at us we become afraid involuntarily, for example. The "fear" the author speaks of is not that natural temporary functional fear, however - it is more a fear of loss, of status, of comforts, of security. I do not believe it is our natural state to fear such things - I believe society ingrains that fear in us through a million different channels from when we are small.

I have said this before in various places - by one means or another, it is important to get into a head-space where you are ready to die at any time. It sounds morbid, I know, but it really isn't. When enough people become willing to let go at any time, nobody will be forced to anymore. I don't know how to articulate that better just yet, but I know it is true.

I'm ready whenever, but that doesn't mean I don't want to live. I enjoy life, for the most part, and I'd like it to continue for a good long while. I will not dishonor myself or perpetuate an abusive cycle by acting in a manner that compromises someone else's life for the sake of my own security, however; if that ends up meaning that I die, then I die. I know it sounds untenable, but again, if enough people really believe this, or have it so ingrained that it is an unconscious state of being (as I believe is entirely natural), nobody will be put in a position where they have to throw their lives away or be yoked to someone else's selfish desire. This is what real freedom is - the freedom from artificial fear.

radical cheap

2009-01-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

Homes are selling for $1000-$3000 in jobless areas like Flint, Detroit and East Cleveland, as banks rush to offload them before they get hit with property taxes and maintenance costs.

high-tech nomadness

2008-12-29T01:15:00.001-08:00

Cyberhobo should like this one ...

Whilst looking for something completely unrelated, I happened across this page called the Journal of High-Tech Nomadness.

This was actually apparently a 'zine published back in the 90s by a guy named Steve Roberts, who spent years travelling America on a totally awesome tricked-out recumbent bike with " ... a cellular phone, a FAX machine, several ham radios, a solar power panel, and seven on-board computers". Apparently he even had corporate sponsorship from Apple and Atari at one point, and has written several books including Computing Across America. And he got started with this in the late 1980s!

Anyway, the linked page is a bit out of date, but Googling revealed that he has a blog - and is currently hoboing about in a similarly tricked-out boat! This guy is living my dream life, basically.

a protracted bark

2008-12-26T08:31:00.000-08:00

Whew! School ended up being much more involved, and demanding of my free time, than I anticipated this past semester. I've admittedly had little desire or energy for cerebral/writing projects at all since early September.

As of Sunday, I turned in my final assignment, and the semester is well and truly over. I return on Jan. 13 to a five-class schedule, but three of those are internet-based. I think this semester will be a bit less draining despite the addition of an extra class (and possibly a CLEP test to boot).

Anyway, I haven't forgotten about An Honest Bark, although I'm certain you have by now. Today, I set about gathering notes and roughly mapping out the three "bonus chapters" that will accompany the version of it you can purchase through Lulu. Of course, the six "primary" chapters that are up now at Cloud Bird Trail will remain there indefinitely; these are more-or-less finished, minus some minor editing for further clarity.

Also - the Lulu version will have my first attempts at sketchy front-and-back cover art. Collector's item waiting to happen, no doubt. Get them before Oprah notices and some major publisher demands to pick it up!

The price will likely be $2.50 or so for the .PDF and ... oh lawd, I dunno about the paperback. Less than On Homelessness In America, since the page length is a bit less, so ... well, no more than ten bucks anyway, and probably more like seven or eight. It'll probably be done in February.

Happy Holidays if you are celebrating, buena suerte for the new year if you are not!

ho ho ho

2008-12-17T18:55:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays!

Great Moments In The Tenderloin #13

2008-12-03T15:05:00.000-08:00

The scene :

I pass a street guy fiddling with his trash bag while walking down the street. As I pass he picks up the bag and starts walking beside me.

GUY : "Wooo, how about that homosexual population?"
ME : "Excuse me?"
GUY : "How about that homosexual population here in this city? Sure is big huh?"
ME : "I guess so."
GUY : "Wooo, there's a lot of 'em."

nice erection

2008-12-02T09:25:00.001-08:00

Ah, I almost forgot to follow up on the city and state results.

California came out a mixed bag. There wasn't a whole lot of dire import up, and most of the good stuff managed to pass, except for Prop 8 (as you may have heard). Legal challenges are ensuing, so it is not over just yet, but in the interim the gay folks are pretty upset by it. I advise looking at it this way - it was not approved by a large margin, and it required an absolutely heroic amount of money and out-of-state support from organized religion, so it does not reflect the will of the people. It is simply a last-gasp rally by hierarchical religion attempting to impose itself on society in a way it has decreasingly been able to do over the generations. Old people were the main demographic that voted in favor of it, and they are dying out by the minute, so I think it is more or less inevitable that we have same-sex equality in time.

Other California stuff - both funding for increased drug treatment for non-violent offenders and funding for Moar Police and Moar Laws got shot down. This tells me that people are simply not in a spending mood right now and will not vote to support things they don't see as personally impacting them, like crime and prison-related issues. That, to me, is more discouraging than the Prop 8 results, because there was no really huge money thrown either against treatment or for the police measure.

San Francisco went progressive almost totally across the board in both the district supervisor and city measures, which surprised me and was heartening. If you've stuck around this blog for awhile you might recall, about two years ago when I moved up north for awhile, I was really dogging San Francisco. That was the result of being broke and penniless here, having no kind of real community and support, and having to spend all my time around hopeless drunkards at the one end and what I call the "District 3 Set" (moneyed yuppies, basically, or Gavin Newsome's base) at the other end - that was all I knew and all I ever saw, leading to my inference that the city's reputation as a "progressive" haven was a whole lot of hot air. Two things have changed my view of the city - one is this recent result, the other is attending City College for the past year-and-a-half, where I have met all the "real" people in the city - the people who are truly good-hearted, intelligent and just good company, the kind of people who I rarely encountered on the streets of the city. So I'm looking at the city in a more favorable light these days. Hell, if the housing situation wasn't so ridiculous here, I could be convinced to settle down.

Anyway, my assumption that the "District 3 Set" was basically poised to take over the city, and impose their "upscale" ideology on the whole of it, was put to the test in this election, and they were stunningly and resoundingly beaten back. The only thing that got shot down here was the affordable housing set-aside measure, which the landlords (a very wealthy and powerful group here) campaigned against at a pitch comparable to the religious attack on Prop 8. Big Money is still a major influence here, and it is still trying to turn this peninsula into a gated community for itself, but it has taken some blows and there is clearly plenty of fight left in the people here.

Obama and the elite

2008-11-24T16:04:00.001-08:00

Before I begin rattling on again about the "elite", and what the Obama presidency tells us about their intentions for the future of the country, it's probably wise to define terms for clarity.

What are the "elite", exactly? First of all, I do not think there is a shadowy global organization such as the Illuminati or the Freemasons who run the whole show, so to speak. These groups do exist, most certainly, but I think for the most part they are either dodges, status symbols, or simply party fraternities like the gatherings at Bohemian Grove. I think some of the elite may dabble in the "occult" for fun, but I do not entertain it as any kind of serious factor in the running of society.

The best metaphor I can come up with to present is this - think of the "elite" not as one unified kingdom that tries to impose ordered rule on the world, but a large confederation of many kingdoms, each with different levels of reach into populations in different geographic areas. These kingdoms frequently compete with each other - sometimes even depose each other - but the one thing that they are all perpetually united in is that they must support the *infrastructure* that makes it possible for them to have kingdoms! Thus, the one true unifying principle of the elite is that they will do as much as they possibly can to maintain this infrastructure - and while one elite kingdom may oppose another that is attempting to impose itself on a population, no elite kingdom will ever attack the socio-economic structures that make their kingdoms possible.

So the "elite", at least in America, are a loose confederation of private interests, all people and businesses who have found a way to game the socio-economic system in some manner or another and put themselves in the upper echelons of wealth and privilege. They are organized to some degree, to accomplish particular tasks, but there is no one SPECTRE-like organization that controls everything and hands down marching orders to everyone.

The number of elite that actually understand their system in its totality are, I believe, relatively few, and these are at the topmost decision-making positions of political, economic and military power. The rest are more or less just acting out their roles in return for financial, social and personal reward.

In terms of American politics, it is the job of both the Republican and Democrat parties to maintain the system of wage-slavery and wealth hierarchy that we exist in at present. They go about it in different ways, however. The Democrats tend toward bribery, while the Republicans tend toward fear, mind control, and threat of starvation - brute force, generally speaking. They embody two different philosophies of rule, but I think both sides have come to realize that they rely on each other in order to maintain the political spectacle that is key to population control.

This is the reason that you hear both emphasize the "middle class" so much in their political stump speeches. The "middle class" do not work any less than the working poor, generally speaking, but they lead much more comfortable lives. They are just as trapped and enslaved in the system, but they are bribed sufficiently to put up with it with relatively little complaint. Neither side wants people to believe they are free and empowered. Both sides want them to believe that the only reasonable goal in their lives is to join the "middle class" if they are not already in it, and to cling to it (or be "restored" to it) if they are already a member, and that the only means of this is participation in the Republican-Democrat political process.

The party in control at the moment is largely determined by how well we - the "radicals", the seekers after wisdom and enlightenment, and in whatever small way, those that protect and advance what is good in humanity - are doing our jobs of both puzzling out what is going on and coming up with solutions to both circumvent the status quo and evolve ourselves, and of getting that information out there and building real community. If we are doing a good job, the Democrats are in power, because the threat of organized rebellion becomes high, and bribery becomes the much more effective strategy. If we are doing our jobs poorly, generally, we get the Republicans, because we have failed to combat adequately the atmosphere of ignorance, fear, hate, pain and paranoia that they thrive on.

We have apparently been doing a very good job as of late, because Obama represents an unprecedented level of bribery in several areas. First of all, his skin color - it was in the lifetimes of our grandparents, and some of our parents that this would be unthinkable on that basis alone. Yes, he's as much "white" as he is "black", but symbolically, this is actually really huge. The elite are still mostly white people - since their rule stems from European global domination stretching back centuries - but they are ceding the fact that they are simply becoming outnumbered in the developed world, and that ethnicity does not and cannot matter anymore.

And though Obama is most certainly a centrist, even right-wing (on a global political scale, not American) on certain issues, he has been allowed to make some rather "radical" proclamations (on the American political scale, not global) during his bid for the Presidency. He has, first of all, been allowed to get away with grassroots, Internet-based, small-scale funding. The elite sicced the mass media on Howard Dean when Dean tried that back in 2004. He has been allowed to repeatedly talk about "bottom-up" change in his stump speeches since the 2004 DNC (he even mentioned it again in his acceptance speech on election night). Being "radical" on cultural issues doesn't matter so much, because the elite really aren't either culturally conservative or religious - they just use those things as needed, but I think they'd rather dispense with them. The thinking is usually a syllogism of the following sort - the elite support conservative parties and forces, these parties and forces emphasize religion all the way to the fringe, therefore, the elite support the religious fringe. That's not really true. Bill Clinton is a fine example - he was completely culturally liberal, but was totally vetted and approved by the elite, because on economic issues he was totally in their pocket, advancing the NAFTA and WTO agenda and generally undermining the poor and working classes. He's also a relevant example because, it appears, Obama is fleshing out his cabinet with the same people who were around Clinton during his run.

So will Obama become the Clinton years 2.0? I suspect something close, but not quite. First, understand, regardless of what Obama's personal intentions are, these appointments are part of the price he pays to the elite for the nomination, for favorable media coverage throughout in their networks, and for just plain not getting his ass blown up in a "plane accident".

First of all, unlike Clinton, Obama has a track record of truly "progressive" legislation. That word is thrown about haphazardly these days, so for clarity, what I mean is legislation that generally redistributes power to the poor and working class at the expense of big business and the economically powerful. Also, the elite seem to be in a tremendous and sudden backpedal considering how forcefully they have rammed their program down our throats over the last eight years of Bush. The only possible, logical explanation is that they, who have the capability to monitor and gauge the public sentiment at a level that we individuals out here cannot even imagine, are sincerely and deeply frightened that we are right on the edge of getting pissed off enough to organize on a broad scale and strip them of their power. Without control of the masses, there is no power, and fear of losing that control is the only fear that the powerful classes have ever really had throughout history. So we are in Big Time Bribery Mode - much more so than when Clinton took power in 1992, as we are coming off nearly a decade of incredible Bush gaffes and an increasingly wired and tech-savvy population that circumvents the official, controlled channels in their communication.

The ideal situation for the elite is that we all act like Randy Marsh on the recent election episode of South Park - invest all the energy we've built up in getting Obama elected, then say "Woooo" and sit back and let business continue as usual, assuming that this one single act represents total victory and America will now change on auto-pilot. Here in San Francisco, in my personal circles, I see a lot of that already. Obama's victory is a victory for us IF we recognize the advantages we now have - we will not have anything meaningful handed to us, in the way of balancing of the playing field between rich and poor, but we will certainly have less obstacles thrown in our path than we have this past decade. What we believe we are going to get with Obama, and what we actually get, will be two completely different things - UNLESS we do our part in our own backyard, retain solidarity, and continue to keep the pressure on to deliver on all the things that were promised. Otherwise, Yes We Can see Bubba Clittin' rule all over again (though this time likely without the bukakke scandal at the end).

UPDATE 12/03 : FiveThirtyEight article that says basically the same thing but with Moar Research and Moar Citation

17 men on a dead man's chest

2008-11-21T13:44:00.000-08:00

Man, school is really taking a bite out of my ass this semester. So, probably light posting until late December, and next year I'm back to mostly online classes.

I had to pop in to pass this one along, though :

Pirate boomtowns popping up on Somali coast

Harkens back to an age I'm sure we thought was all dead - Caribbean scallywags raiding from the haven of pirate towns like Tortuga, protected by corrupt government!

I would love to go and actually visit some of these towns, but I was afraid that being American Honky I would be held for ransom/killed pretty much as a matter of course.

However :

"The attackers generally treat their hostages well in anticipation of a big payday, hiring caterers on shore to cook spaghetti, grilled fish and roasted meat that will appeal to Western palates."

Geez, that's better than I do as a free man in my own society! When's the next cargo freighter to Africa leaving?

Paul Broun Godwins the national dialogue, and the Troll Army

2008-11-14T13:55:00.000-08:00

You've likely seen this going around by now :

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iRxZox4GFoIweckPDP1oRhKBlHOwD94CCDU00

If not, a freshman Georgia Congressman (elected last year in a special runoff) dug through an old Obama speech, came up with a snippet about forming a "civilian defense corps" to supplement the military in national defense issues, and came up with Obama= the next Hitler.

He then decided it was a wise idea to open his mouth and share this with the universe.

So of course, "Senator claims Obama is Hitler, wants dictatorship" headlines start showing up over the last two days.

So he issues a follow-up statement follow-up statement in which he sort of apologizes, but not really, and doesn't actually take back anything, or inject any more reason or sanity into what he said.

From the statement -

"Personally, I think that such headlines are a bit sensationalistic. The focus really should be more on Barack Obama’s remarks than upon what I have said about them."

Actually, no.

Perhaps Obama should clarify what he meant in that speech - that would be a helpful matter of public interest. But what is more important is that we know why YOU went specifically digging for such a quote, and then further decided to use the mass media to invoke the image of Hitler in the public consciousness.

You see, there are really only two logical possibilities for why a man in your position would say a thing like that to the public.

1) You're a wacko and/or an idiot - This seems to be the explanation that the "libuhruhl mediuhr" is going with offhand, but I don't buy it. Yes, you are a wingnut Republican as clearly indicated by your Senate record. However, you are also a medical doctor (with a degree and everything!), and you did manage to get yourself elected to Congress. I have a hard time swallowing that you are either stupid enough to not understand the ramifications of a statement like this, or that you are wacko enough to actually believe that what you said is true.

By logical process of elimination, I thus find the second possibility FAR more likely -

2) This is a calculated, coded message to the real wackos out there, in an attempt to nudge one of them into becoming the next Oswald (only, y'know, with inverted political and social beliefs).

...

People are taking the Obama victory as a harbringer of positive change to America. Perhaps it will end up being so. But, beginning with the Palin nomination and the sorts of people she immediately began drawing out of the woodwork and rallying, it also exposes a minority, but substantial, faction of America that is lost in a fog of hate, fear, paranoia, self-centeredness, generally a stew of all the worst possible qualities, and it shows that we apparently have no shortage of politicians ready, willing and able to step in and attempt to lead this group in organized action for their own gain.

The fomation of this Troll Army is troubling, and something we most definitely need to keep wary of. There will be more shots across the bow. The appropriate response to this one would be for the news media - the intended watchdog of American democracy - to relentlessly grill Broun on the motivations behind his statement, and for his constituency to hold him accountable for his irresponsible comments. In a sane country, such commentary would have immediately rendered him unfit in the public eye for office, and seen him stripped of his Congressional seat, but we are not quite at that level of general enlightenment just yet.

hobo on the issues

2008-11-03T17:12:00.000-08:00

Man, it started pissing down rain here while I was in class this afternoon, and shows no signs of abatement.

This + long lines at the polls will not be such a pleasant experience tomorrow.

Anyway, I decided to vote. I was wavering for awhile, and I still don't really see much purpose in voting for Prez in a city that will go 85-90% for Obama, but there are some interesting city and state issues that are on the ballot that are closely contested and I'd like to chip in on.

So here you go, my endorsements for the California voters out there -

PRESNUT - Barack Lolbama - Man fuck it, if I associated with "radical groups" they might give me an earful about this, but I don't really give a shit about such people so that works out well for everyone. Anyway, this is more of a social experience than anything. Everyone is so happy and enthused! It might be false hope, but shit, it's better than glum relentless slave-funk.

There are two things I genuinely like about Obama, regardless of whether he turns out to be corporate-owned or not. One, he's articulate and composed and intelligent. It'll be nice to have the U.S. represented in front of the world in such a manner for a change. Two, President Palin would be the most horrid and frightening thing to ever happen to America, ever. This country would end in fire.

That said, if Preznit was a separate vote I wouldn't bother, given the conditions, but since I'm going to vote on the State props and the city district appointments anyway, I suppose I can check Lolbama's box while I am there.

CALIFORNIA MEASURES

Prop 1A (High Speed Rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco) - YES - This is mostly gonna benefit business types at first, but I am for it anyway for several reasons. One, said business types won't be driving their SUVs, polluting and nearly killing people in crosswalks while blathering on their phones about their IRAs. Two, if funded properly, it creates a lot of decent jobs. Three, and perhaps most important, it sets a precedent for both state and national rejuvenation of high speed rail.

Fourth is purely selfish - I think it would be cool, and convenient from a hobo standpoint. Currently buses and trains take 12+ hours (at best) to get that far south from here and it is always a crowded and not so pleasant ride. Gallivanting up and down the coast in a bullet train sounds pretty awesome.

Prop 2 (Standards for farm animal treatment in captivity) - YES - Cruelty to animals blows, and creates bad food to boot. I have no problem with eating them but give them a decent life beforehand.

Prop 5 ($460 mil annualy for nonviolent offender drug treatment programs) - YES - Less jail, more treatment for nonviolent drug offenders. If you took even a cursory look at On Homelessness In America you'll understand why I support this. The "Ruthless Crackdown" approach merely continues to perpetuate the situation and enrich a few certain private interests.

Prop 6 (more funding for police, jails, creates 30 new Cali criminal laws) - NO - This is basically the inverse of Prop 5.

Prop 7 (renewable energy standards) - YES

Prop 8 (outlaws same-sex marraige in the state) - NO - Honestly, I feel pretty distant from this issue. But, I've been working with some gay dudes in study groups in such at school this semester and they convinced me that it's really important to oppose this. It really is basically discrimination, and thus a human and civil rights issue. Passing Prop 8 = another step towards fundamentalist troll America of the sort that Palin and her followers want to build. Fuck that noise.

Prop 12 (bonds for veterans to purchase farm and homes via subsidized loans) - YES

Anything I didn't mention, I am leaving blank due to not knowing enough about the issue to have an informed vote

SAN FRANCISCO CITY MEASURES

Prop B (Affordable Housing Set-Aside) - YES

Prop K (Decriminalizing Prostitution) - NO - The thing that troubles me about this is that it appears to totally slash funding to police units that investigate illegal sex trade. Lots of women, particularly Asians, get tricked into coming over here to pay off debt and forced into rough sex work. This is one of the few arms of law enforcement I actually appreciate and I do not think it is wise to neuter it in a city that has a huge underground problem with sex slavery and abuse. I'm all for women like Hobo Stripper or whatever, who know what they are doing, having this, but it needs to be revised and reworded so as not to leave the victimized out to dry.

Prop L (Community Justice Center) - FUCK NO - This creates a separate court for the homeless in the Tenderloin, basically a kangaroo court that sends them straight to jail on any bullshit infraction. It's part of "Gavs" and his downtown financiers Master Plan to ultra-gentrify the city and run out all the "undesirables" and it is fucking despicable.

Prop M (Tenant Harrassment) - YES - This is a boon to the people living in SF's 120 SROs, among others

Prop R (rename water treatment plant to George W. Bush Sewage Plant) - YES - lol

Prop T (substance abuse set aside) - YES

Prop U (Iraq Funding Policy Statement) - YES - Symbolic and ineffectual, but fuck it, why not

blank measures, same story as before

lol disturbing

2008-10-31T01:18:00.000-07:00

I think it's so disturbing because it has captured her inner essence.

(These are all over SF right now, are they anywhere else?)

oh, boy, this is interesting

2008-10-20T22:17:00.001-07:00

Palin breaks from McCain position on gay marraige

Speaking before thinking (or, given her track record so far, without thinking)?

Could be just a gaffe ...

OR ...

could be she is conceding defeat in advance, and trying to use her national limelight time to set herself up as the fascist populist fundamentalist troll army leader of the future - the focal rallying point for all those "KILL THE TERRORIST" types that keep showing up at her rallies.

Interesting!

lol western PA

2008-10-15T17:49:00.001-07:00

I think I've mentioned this a time or three here on the blog

Thanks for the validation Murtha

It's more quiet in Pittsburgh because there's a lot of black people living there, but get a bunch of working-class white dudes alone with just themselves and nine times out of ten "nigger" and "wetback" jokes are gonna come up. I worked crap labor jobs there for years, Murtha ain't lyin'.

"yoah name is Toby!" crack "Barack Obama!"

2008-10-12T20:39:00.001-07:00

The controlling elite don't want McCain, the people don't want McCain, nobody wants McCain. Poor guy.

The only people that DO want him now are evangelicals, who actually just want Palin and had nothing to do with him before she jumped on board, and flat-out angry racist cracker assholes.

Seriously, watch his stump speeches and rallies on Youtube from the past week or two. It's worth it. Look at the people who get up and speak, listen to what they chant and what they boo. This is the dredges of racist, idiot, redneck America crawling out of their dark crevasses out of abject, stupid fear and paranoia.

What I think is most interesting is the subtle way that McCain is pandering to this group in the desperate hopes that maybe there's enough of them to outweigh all the progressives and people of color that are going to hit the polls this year that usually don't bother to go. I think it's an amazingly desperate display. His whole campaign has been attack ads and "LOL MORE LIKE O'BOMBER AMIRITE" insinuations, but it's gone to a more transparent level in the last couple of weeks. Still subtle - you can't get away with open race-baiting, especially in this climate - but definitely more noticeable than usual.

There was Palin stressing this really nebulous connection with Bill Ayers, McCain's little "that one" at the second debate (could have been an Old Man Moment, but in light of everything else, I suspect it was a coded message to the racists and paranoiacs) ... the really high profile moment lately has been that old frizz-haired lady standing up at the one rally and saying "He's an Arab!", which is the moment where McCain had to back her down and try to cool the crowd out, because that went over the line from covert code to overt race-baiting.

But he hasn't stopped with the covert messages ... here's his latest, and it's the most entertaining yet - McCain vows to "whip that uppity niggers ass" at the next debate. Well, uh ... that's not verbatim, I translated it for you :)

FAQ

2008-10-12T00:16:00.000-07:00

I started a FAQ, since I got some questions. It's incomplete at the moment; I'm going to add a link to this post to the sidebar and work on it over time.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

* What is all this? Why do you live this way? Why do you do anything you do?

Rational self-interest. I want a better world to live in. I have had more than enough of this one.

* Can you sum up your personal philosophy?

Yar har fiddley dee, being a pirate is alright with me.

* Is 'Ryan Garou' your real name?

It's as real as any other name. It's not my birth or legal name, if that's what you are after.

I write under a pen name mostly just to keep people from Googling into my privacy. I honestly don't much care if some people know my 'real' identity, but I'm not going to just throw it out there and make it easy for anyone to barge up into my business. I've never published anything under my "real name" on the internet, and if you Google it you get a whole slew of irrelevant results involving people who aren't me anyway. As far as The Establishment goes, I think they see me as a kook and minor nuisance at most, if they even think of me at all, which they probably don't.

There's also another reason. We live in a society that perpetuates much artificial fear, and that also makes many people emotionally unbalanced and mentally unstable, which in turns generates a lot of legitimate fear! There's a lot of that fear-baggage attached to the word "homeless". It is extremely rare to find someone who will accept you as you are and trust you readily anymore. When people hear that I am "homeless", regardless of how wise, kind or understanding they might be, it injects at least a little of that fear into their interactions with me, and shuts doors that may have been opened - "He seems sane, and nice, but if he's homeless ... there must be some drug use he isn't talking about ... he must be at least a *little* crazy ... I better be careful just in case he steals something/wants to attack me ... " - and thus we are at a distance that we should not be at.

Put it this way - I tell people when it needs to be told, but the rest of the time, I don't feel it needs to be anyone's business.

* Are you really "homeless"?

I'm without the means to have a stable long-term living arrangement. I mostly live indoors these days, but in substandard housing that is slightly overpriced, and with no lease or tenant protections. Generally, I have to move at least once a month. Sometimes, when I don't have money, I spend a month or three in shelters. For the first year or so of my "homeless" life, I camped in the woods out of necessity, but now I only do it when I feel like it, and I don't ever sleep on streets.

* Why are you homeless? You seem pretty smart.

The socio-economic order in America has little use for me, and I for it.

* Are there any terms that offend you?

"Homeless" isn't offensive to me, but it is constraining. The term suggests that the problem is simply economic and personal, when the true fundamental problem is lack of genuine community, which affects everyone, not just the "homeless". The people who are "homeless" are usually just those most strongly affected by the fallout of the social consensus to live as we do, in this artificial, unreal way. It's the term we've got, though, and I use it, if only for easy shorthand that everyone understands.

Most pejorative terms relating to the homeless are only offensive if the intent behind them is to be offensive. I happily refer to myself and others as a "hobo", and many of us take it as a point of pride, but in the mouth of some spoiled suburban kid shouting it while rolling by in an expensive car, it takes on a whole new context. Same with "vagabond", "tramp", things like that. The only terms I consider universal pejoratives are things like "bum" (which I happily use myself to describe both homeless and non-homeless individuals who deserve it), and even that can be used in a playful and jocular way.

* Where do you sleep/live?

Right now I'm in the city of San Francisco. I've spent most of the last three years in the San Francisco Bay area. I have some gripes with it, mostly the cost of housing and a high concentration of priviliged assholes, but even with that I'm still pretty happy here, and I'd settle down if I saw a good opportunity.

I spend most of my nights sleeping indoors. Right now, I can afford to rent a room, so I do. I generally spend at least two or three months per year in a shelter bed. I camp out here and there, but only for fun these days. When I was camping "for real", I used a Hennessy Hammock and an ultra-light sleeping bag to camp in various parts of Golden Gate Park for awhile. I've also used the hammock in various wooded areas of Marin and Sonoma counties, and spent a couple of nights wrapped up in a tarp behind the dunes at Ocean Beach (not recommended).

* How much stuff do you own? Where do you keep it?

I have a 4x4, $29-a-month storage unit that is actually mostly full. I keep my "indoor stuff" (which takes up the bulk of the space) and my "outdoor gear" that I'm not using there.

* Do you have drug or alcohol problems?

No. I like a beer, a little wine, or a rum-and-cola here and there, but not very often. I won't turn down a joint if offered, but I'm not into weed enough to buy it for myself. I'm open to experimenting with peyote or other mind-expanders in favorable circumstances, but I haven't yet, and as far as anything harder than that I don't mess with it.

* Are you crazy?

No. I'm probably a little depressed - who wouldn't be given the circumstances? I don't think it is clinical, though, and the extremely hit-or-miss operation of antidepressants along with some rather frightening side effects keeps me away from them. Beyond that, I seem to function better than most of the people with "good jobs" that I've met.

* Yew sound like a comminist terr'ist. Are yew now or have yew ever been seekin' to overthrow the United States Government??!

I don't advocate overthrow of the government, chiefly because it's a nearly impossible goal and thus tactically stupid. A better move is to make the government, corporations and banks not matter to you, by forming your own independent support networks and learning skills that make as many government and corporate "services" unnecessary as possible. On an individual level, it increases your personal liberty, happiness and well-being, and is worthwhile just for those things alone even if it never leads to any kind of a "revolution". If enough people choose to live in this way, however, there'll be a de facto revolution without one blow struck or shot fired - or a new organization coming to power and becoming the new oppressor class.

* What are your political leanings?

I identify most closely with the ideas of Libertarian Socialism and Libertarian Municipalism, though I don't support any particular organized "-ist" or "-ism" group at this point. (Important note for newcomers: That's not "libertarian" as in Ayn Rand, Ron Paul or the Libertarian Party. "Libertarianism" as a political/social theory is in many ways diametrically opposed to what I am after.)

The way I'd optimally like to see humanity arranged is in small, fully self-sufficient communities of no more than a few hundred people each, affiliated in a loose, non-centrally-controlled, non-hierarchical network for the purposes of fair trade, travel and mutual assistance. This, of course, is Utopia, and I have no illusions about seeing it in my lifetime, but I figure if you have to shoot for something it may as well be the stars.

My interactions these past four years with both the most marginalized elements of society (the homeless) and with a school that by all rights should be a hotbed of radicalism (CCSF, made up almost entirely of low-income working class, minorities and queers) has given me a healthy dose of practical reality, however. The sad fact of the matter is that repressive hierarchy and the values of slash-and-burn capitalism are so pervasive at this point, and have done such a hell of a job on the psyche, that many more people than not would rather beg to have their chains put back on than to embrace the prospect of true freedom! The anarchist theorists like Bookchin, removed as they are from the milieu at the bottom have, I think, been overly optimistic in their assessment of human nature and how humans will react to facing the sudden prospect of not being told what to do anymore and not having police watching them at every step.

Given this reality, I think that it will take generations for us to raise enough people who are physically and mentally whole and strong enough to handle the responsibilities of self-organized, self-sustaining community without destroying themselves and each other somehow. I think the best thing we can do, at this very moment, is push in every way that we can for a more socialist and equitable form of "big government", one that ensures the basic needs of all are taken care of and that their spirits are not crushed, and over time do as much as we can to strip it of central control and of its repressive and domination-based elements. If we can manage to raise a few successive generations that do not have to burn all their energy in competing with each other viciously for table scraps, and if we use wisely both our time and tools that we have now like the internet, humanity may end up coming out of this gracefully after all.

terrorist, your game is through

2008-10-10T13:58:00.000-07:00

LOL, B and S are NOWHERE near each other on the keyboard!

just a thang

2008-10-07T16:33:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks I've nitpicked some stuff Ran Prieur has posted, so today I wanted to highlight something that he articulated that I thought was very well put -

"I've said this many times in the last couple years, including in my big 9/29 post, but maybe I haven't said it explicitly enough. I do not believe in The Crash. The word "crash" is a bad metaphor, because it makes you think of a plane crash or a car crash, something sudden and physically catastrophic, and nothing like that has happened in history, except natural disasters like volcanoes and tsunamis, and local bombings. Even "collapse" is a bad metaphor. Imaginary systems like Bear Stearns can collapse in hours, and buildings can collapse in seconds, but the changes in your life will happen over many years and only look catastrophic in far hindsight.

And even if I agreed with the word "crash", I would still reject the word "the"! We can talk about "a" financial collapse, "a" famine, "a" war, "a" period of hyperinflation, "a" retooling of the tech system, "a" ruined city. Every event in history is unique, but "the" implies not a unique event, but a unique category of event. Goddammit, we are not at the end of history. We are always, always, always in the middle of history.

When our descendants look back 100 years from now, whatever they call the present adjustment, they will almost certainly say that it started with the financial crisis a few weeks ago, just as we say that the depression of the 1930's started with the stock market crash in 1929. When I say "this is what the crash looks like," I don't mean that we won't get any more changes, but that they won't come any faster than in the last few weeks, and that our world will never resemble The Road Warrior. We will not be fighting off roving hordes, but going through our lives adjusting to changes in the background, and in 20 years we'll look back and say "Wow, what happened?!"

OK! (salute)

Frankly, this is what I *hope* happens. The present "financial collapse" is certainly not the end of the world, but it, HOPEFULLY, serves as a very visible and dramatic lesson to regular people - the present economic and social systems we have built and that we give our lives over to maintain are a fraud, unsustainable, and we need to adjust in order to progress, and this may mean some temporary sacrifice - but the sooner we start doing it, the quicker things get much better!

The major problem, as I see it, is that we have abandoned local, immediate, real community in favor of "globalization" and systems that are built really for the sole purpose of making about 5% of the world population unbelievably rich and powerful. One of the only means of making this house of cards stand was to create a financial system that deals in predatory lending based on imaginary money - the "bailout" and everything else we are seeing are attempts to hold the failed system in place, and we are really better off just letting it fall so that we can start re-organizing in a more enlightened and sensible way ASAP. But way too many people are too invested at this point in the status quo, and frankly too many people are still just too dim and selfish to handle an enlightened restructure at this point, so the elite will guide the majority of humanity towards preserving it - but we may still yet gain something from all this, particularly if, as signs seem to now indicate, this systemic collapse is irreversable (the only way to prop up a system built on imaginary money is with more money ... but finite production capacity may finally be so strained at this point that imaginary money just can't be pulled out of nowhere as it has been for decades now).

Anyway, this is an opportunity, not a disaster ... the only thing that concerns me is that some hardcore Doomers, Crashers and Anti-Civs really *want* a disaster, and see this as an opportunity to create it!

Now is the time to really, really air ideas out there. People are going to be more willing to listen than usual - particularly to ideas along socialist lines, which I think is the only way for us to all live sane, stable and decent lives until we can raise a few successive generations of good, healthy people who are capable of self-government. SANE, well-reasoned, workable ideas though - not crazy talk based on fantasy world-building!

oh, and

2008-10-01T09:54:00.001-07:00

Palin calls herself the "Joe Six-Pack" candidate

LOL

LOL

LOL

LOL

LOL

media control

2008-10-01T09:42:00.000-07:00

Here's what should be labeled as an opinion piece (but isn't) from Time magazine that illustrates nicely one of the things I mentioned in the last post :

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20081001/us_time/whyarentamericansbuyingthebailout

The Old Media is most definitely under marching orders to frame the bailout as something urgent and necessary for the American people ... watch CNN for just an hour or so and you'll see what I mean. This article simply posits that the propaganda methods used thus far have been ineffective ... and they need to get scarier, louder, more frequent and more dramatic! It'll be interesting to see if this is what happens over the next week or two.

let it fall

2008-09-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

Whee, so the House (surprisingly) rejected the Wall Street bailout package yesterday.

It's better if we get no taxpayer-funded bailout at all, but I'm certain they'll ram one through eventually. They have to. Letting the banks be devoured by their own policies of amoral free-market exploitation they have been worshipping, in fine Cthulu style, would be the best thing that could happen for ordinary Americans, which is why there's no chance they will let it.

Again, IANAE (economist), so take this for what it is worth. But, when CNN is hyping something like this 24-7 with simplistic graphs and idiot talking heads, and when the Bush administration is the driving force behind it, and when the guy making all the dire threats about the economy is the same guy that was at the helm of Goldman Sachs just a couple of years ago, you can make a few fairly strong inferential conclusions about what is really going on here.

The elite are above and beyond all this - I'm sure they've seen it coming for years and possibly even planned it this way. It's the upper-middle-class, or the low-level rich, who are the only ones who are really going to suffer here - parasites who live off of investments, smaller bankers, etc. Bernanke is sort of their mouthpiece, although he's more the Bush mouthpiece, or the elitist cadre that is going to exploit this situation to leverage more power and more resources for themselves (hey, if they were willing to do it with the death of thousands of people in a terrorist attack, you better believe they are willing to do it with something as relatively mundane as an economic dip).

Anyway, Bush and his people, as usual, try to exploit a (largely media fueled) "crisis" by ramming through legislation that gives them even broader powers and priviliges and generally strips away at what is left of the legal protections of the working class and the social safety net. Amazingly - and I'm not sure why this happened just yet, but my only thought at this time is that it is due to confusion among the junior political members as to what they are "supposed" to be doing in this situation without clear marching orders, amplified by a Presidential election right around the corner - the House shoots it down. This means further wrangling and revision, not the end of the bailout.

Nor does it mean the end of the world, though the "Crashers" and the "Doomers" are predictably jerking themselves off and congratulating themselves on being right all along, and wondering how long it will be before they can ride their bikes on the abandoned freeways and live off a subsistence diet of foraged nuts and berries. Nevermind that the economy has actually been in this exact position before several times without everyday life really changing in any significant way, and also nevermind that it's all fake anyway, and that the end of credit liquidity does not mean that production of anything suddenly becomes impossible ... but you know what, fuck it, I'm sick of them. It isn't even worth my energy. They live in a fear-and-adrenaline fueled fantasy world and practice selective reception in order to reinforce their preconcieved conclusions, which cannot possibly occur short of thermonuclear war and/or massive biological pandemic ... but even then, life wouldn't turn out to be nearly anything like what they predict. But I'm wasting too much energy on them. That's not what I came here for. This is -

Let's say there's no public-funded bailout. Somehow Congress has a flash of integrity and adamantly resists any and all attempts. There are only one of two possibilities - either ...

1) Bernanke and crew are lying about how devastating these bank failures would be to the general economy, in which case we ("we" being poor and working class Americans) have little to worry about unless you have some parasite job in the "financial sector" where you don't prodcue anything or provide any useful service to anyone anyway (ProTip : Start either doing or learning how to do one of those two things).

2) Bernanke and crew are actually telling the truth based on rational and factual estimates - in which case, we (same "we" as above) come out as winners, because Americans won't start doing stuff like wisely using space and resources, demanding real community and local culture, taking control of their own production, etc. as long as they are largely fat and happy and bought off with drugs and Everybody Loves Raymond and all of that shit. Let the country sit at 30% unemployment for a couple of years, however ... hell, ratchet it up to 40% or so ... and people will start discovering very quickly how little they actually need to be happy (and how easily they can obtain it nearby when it is not fenced off and guarded from them), how badly they've been lied to and manipulated, and how awesome life can be when you form your own small, autonomous, self-sustaining groups free of artificial bullshit (and simply start taking stuff that greedy exploiters attempt to lock up and ration out to maintain their power). And that means the end for hierarchial rule, extreme wealth and the whole power structure - which is why the bailout is being pushed so hard on all available channels, and why there's extremely little chance it won't eventually happen in some form or another.

Get Your Bentley Runnin' (dun dun du du) Load Up On Viagra! (dun dun du du)

2008-09-18T18:03:00.002-07:00

Let's get our minds off of hard-right fascism and bread lines for a bit.

Check out this commercial I just saw with Dennis Hopper in it :

LOL, man, I mean, how perfect is that? The emblem of the selfish fake-ass Johnny-come-lately Sixties "counter culture rebels", who only got into it after Hollywood co-opted it and made a movie about it, and who now live in places like Marin County and have stock portfolios, making a commercial in 2008 to pitch financial advice or what the fuck ever to them as "part of their journey".

Oh, the roffles, they are quite tasty.

Poore, Indebted, Discontented and Armed

2008-09-18T18:03:00.001-07:00

OK, so I said no more political/social speculation until after the election. But so much fascinating stuff is happening in such rapid-fire succession I feel compelled to talk about it, at least in the sense of "what if" scenarios.

That's the Spectacle - it's designed to be engrossing, and it's really delivering this year!

First of all - the "Sarah Palin surge" and Obama going from being trounced in opinion polls to overnight nearly being beaten by the same margins he previously held, all on the strength of the surprise VP appointment of an unknown MILF from Alaska. My first instinctual reaction was that it was basically a media-created pack of lies, and definitive proof that Gallup and all those other polls cannot be trusted for anything and exist simply to provide news channels with quick hits of drama that draw eyeballs to their advertisements. Americans are stupid, but I just can't swallow that there are that many that are both that stupid and still undecided (and choosing to participate) at this point that there's essentially a 30% reversal overnight because you throw Peggy Hill out there.

My suspicion was that it was simply a desperate gambit to add Moar Drama to a Republican campaign that even the ardent supporters had no reason to get excited about, and that the mass news media was artificially inflating Palin's popularity and giving her piles of positive exposure to inject excitement and controversy into what was previously a very boring and very one-sided race. However, after having had a couple more weeks to scrutinize Palin and see where both the political parties and the media run with this, I now have to wonder if she isn't really part of the elite leadership plan after all.

My premise thus far - Obama wins, as a concession by the Powers to try to curtail open revolution and real grass-roots organization and local focus. We get a few things with him that help out the "common man", but he doesn't do anything radical to shake up the global power heirarchy. This is why he has been allowed to proceed to the point he has thus far, why he gets such favorable media coverage and why even FOX News is now treating him (relatively speaking) with the kid gloves.

There are some new possibilities being raised, however, given all that has been happening lately. First of all - Lehman Brothers and Merill Lynch both publically announce Epic Fail on the same day. I am admittedly out of my depth here, as I know little about economics and almost nothing about Wall Street and the world of "high finance", but I find it extremely suspicious that we not only have these two very high-profile failures made public in such a short space of time, but the very next day, the American Insurance Group gets an $85 billion taxpayer-funded bailout from the Federal government out of absolutely nowhere and with no prior public discussion or even awareness. Is the timing really a coincidence?

You learn a lot more from the mass media in America by focusing on what they don't show and what they don't say, than what they do. Let's step back to the "stimulus checks" of a few months ago for just a second. When it was announced, do you recall hearing a tremendous amount of public debate on the subject? Was the emphasis really made that this was a very rare, strange and unusual move? For the readers out there who have been American and cognizant for, let's say, at least 20 years or so now - when in the hell do you ever hear of government just handing out $300 to $600 to the vast majority of America's 300+ million population, just completely out of nowhere and with relatively little partisan resistance (and without anyone even really requesting it)? You can't even get a Band-Aid out of the government without miles of red tape and hassle and multiple forms filled out in triplicate - but suddenly they just randomly deposit hundreds of dollars in everyone's bank account, in the *hopes* that it will bolster the economy? No one was bringing it up in the mass media - they treated it like it was a nice little surprise that wasn't a real big deal - but this was actually a shocking move and one that really underscores how desperate things have become and how radical change could be upon us very soon.

Back to the new "wave of bailouts" which, as I write this, may not yet be over (I just saw a news ticker saying something to the effect that Ford and Chrysler were licking their chops at the possibility of government loans after some sort of meeting with Pelosi). Interestingly, we seem to be getting socialism by default in America, as the whole economic house of cards collapses so visibly and rapidly that there is apparently no other way to hold the whole mess together. However, aside from the "stimmilis", right now it is largely socialism for the upper classes. You run some big company that has historically served to enrich it's owners and primary shareholders at the expense of everyone and anyone around it, and when that Ponzi scheme reaches its inevitable belly-up point, you get a government bail-out that is somehow 100% legal and constitutional to be instituted overnight with no prior notification to anyone in the public and no discussion whatsoever in Congress. I think by fiat, however, if they continue the "bailout" mentality, it's going to have to "trickle down" to the commoners, because not only do the engines of financial opression and hierarchial power fail without some semblance of the American status quo being maintained (even for the plebians), the rabble will only stand for seeing so much of megacorps being subsidized while they struggle to pay basic bills before they threaten open and ugly revolt.

(Interesting side note - I have a room with cable right now. I've been keeping an eye on CNN - you know, the ostensibly objective, neutral, factual, Serious Business news network. The second the AIG thing was announced the other day - and I literally mean *the second* - CNN was on the air doing damage control for the bailout, all with nice little brackets and graphs drawn up showing "how badly the whole economy" would be affected if laissez-faire capitalism was allowed to actually have it's natural way with AIG. It was open defense of and advocation for the government's sudden move, and there was simply no hiding it. Pravda here we are. In case there was any doubt left about what CNN is, tonight they've had Donald Trump on the phone for hours - literally hours, during prime time - giving his take on the economy and how it can be saved. Donald Fucking Trump. I shit you not.)

OK, so what does all this have to do with Palin and McCain? Let's run a few "what ifs" (or "what? MILFs?") and see where we wind up.

First of all, how the fuck did Palin even get the nomination? Did they really just decide, "Jesus we got nothing, this chick is the only halfway hot Republican we can find, let's throw her out there and see if we can get the Any Woman At All Feminists and the Idiot Joe Six-Packs"? Does McCain really just have a thing for her, and figured, "Fuck it, I'm losing anyway, might as well see if I can get a little end-of-life side booty on the way out here"?

I actually think it really is something like that. Either that, or she somehow came to elite attention, and they threw her out there (given that the Republicans were wrote off as a lost cause this year already anyway) to see how people would react to a MILFy fascist populist - and, with the help of media complicity, they appear to be reacting very well!

But now things get a bit confusing. To ease the confusion, first of all forget about Palin being a member of the Alaska seccesionist party or whatever - it's irrelevant. She's a stereotypical weaselly career politician, at the time that was the side that offered her the most benefit (when she probably never foresaw she would rise so far so fast in politics), and now that she's moved to a much bigger stage, it doesn't matter anymore. So don't read anything into that.

However, we still have the issue that the media - even the "conservative media" - seems to be surprisingly critical of her. If they're trying to push her, why keep running with this "lack of vetting" angle? You know why? Look at the stuff that gets pushed the hardest and gets the most attention - it's the stuff that totally doesn't matter! Her daughter's pregnancy, the obtuse and personal "Troopergate" thing - none of these things will make someone who has bought into her image cash back out of it. Meanwhile, the really frightening and disturbing stuff about her is on the back pages, if even seen.

I've long held that the truly prophetic dystopian novel for America is not 1984 - it's Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here". Not letter-for-letter, but just in terms of the general concept - "straight talking" populist plays on divisiveness, fear, hatred and the generally ugly aspects of humanity to convince a whole bunch of poor and disenfranchised people that they are rebelling against the "elite", when they are really just becoming the brownshirt army of a slightly reconstituted elite. Look at the conditions we have now - sliding towards economic depression with the ready-made villains of greedy Wall Street types ready to take the stage as the fall guys. I'm just saying, if you want to introduce a fascist populist, suddenly the conditions are very favorable - and I never thought it would either come this soon or come in the form of a MILF, but that just may be what the game winds up being.

But, again, just a "what if", a possible course of events. Obama is apparently "rebounding" in the (fake) polls. Until I see stronger evidence I still believe the elite program is for him to win; however, I'm no longer so 100% certain as I was prior to this whole parade of events.

hold fast

2008-09-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

I've decided to put the brakes (temporarily) on my theorizing about power moves in America, simply because we are now less than two months from the Presidential election, and if Obama doesn't win, that tells me I am thinking in the wrong direction and need to step back and re-assess what the elite game plan really is (I don't know if this "Sarah Palin surge" is just part of the spectacle, or the elite switching gears yet again to a new strategy).

So let's see how that turns out first.

news nuglets

2008-09-04T18:10:00.000-07:00

Just some interesting stuff I happened to encounter all at once.

As should be no surprise, the rich got richer worldwide last year. The top 1% of the world's population controls 35% of the world's wealth, and households that have at least 5 million dollars in total assets control 1/5 of the world's total wealth. It ain't conspiracy theory folks, 1% of the world owns over 1/3 of the world's total production capacity.

This I've always suspected, given that I only get strong cravings for "junky" stuff like cheeseburgers and super burritos in two situations - after a really strenuous workout, or if I've been writing/researching for an extended period.

And don't look now but apparently Dick Cheney is doing his best to singlehandedly get us into another war before his term in office is up. I guess when you want warmongering done right, you gotta fly out there and do it yourself.

remember that show 'Dinosaurs'? This isn't it.

2008-09-02T15:51:00.000-07:00

Dinosaur Comics, a fun new comic I just ran into today

selling dissent

2008-09-02T15:02:00.001-07:00

I have divided feelings on this song by The Flobots that has gone incredibly viral in the past couple of months.

It's good because it's more challenging than pop music usually is, and it's "modern" and has a slick enough video to (obviously) get kids into it.

It's bad because I highly suspect it is the first in a new wave of "selling dissent". Dissent and discontent is hotter right now than at any time in the country since the '60s, and don't think all the evil marketroids who run all the privacy-invading tracking systems out there haven't noticed. Understand, being a Cynic, I have to be suspicious when the band behind the song makes their first major public appearances on Carson Daly, Loveline, Jay Leno and the Alex Jones Show. Does a band that actually has something challenging to say and genuine ideals do that? You, the viewer, decide.

Personally, I think it is popular not because of the "deep" content - which may largely be written in by the viewer - but because people are focusing on the relationship between the two characters in the video, rather than the nuances of the critique of civilization. In other words, it's the same shallow emotional button-pushing that Squaresoft video games consistently indulge in ...

the dog days of summer

2008-09-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

A major problem that I have had to present with my writing - at least, the Serious Business sorts of writing - is that it would greatly benefit from some form of peer review prior to publication, yet, due to present circumstances, I know of no one who meets the dual qualifications of both having the time and interest to do so, and also has the background and the intellectual chops to really offer substantiative and meaningful suggestions for improvement. So, I end up just self-editing and going with whatever I wind up with in the end.

Thus I've decided on a new approach for my latest book, An Honest Bark. By following that hypertext link you will find the "free" HTML-ized version at my other site, Cloud Bird Trail. This version is a sort of pre-release, however; the version that I eventually release on Lulu, once I get the front and back covers drawn, will also incorporate any useful feedback I happen to get from those who read the HTML version, and also will include some just-for-fun "bonus chapters" about Hercules, the movie 300, and other subjects. As stated previously, there will probably be a PDF for about $1, and then a paper edition (the price of which I am unsure of until I actually finalize and submit it to Lulu).

Oh, and what's the book about? Philosophy. Specifically, classic Greek Cynicism, and what I like to call the New Cynicism. You should read it!

ciclovia

2008-09-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

I went to San Francisco's Ciclovia on Sunday, camera in hand, expecting to see throngs of people walking in the middle of the Embarcadero, enjoying a car-free street for one small period of time out of the year.

Well, er ... perhaps I was a little too early (around 9 to 10 a.m.) because all I saw was a scattered handful of bikers ... and hardly anybody walking in the street ... but lots of people walking on the sidewalk along the water right next to the street.

To be fair I didn't walk the whole thing. The bulk of it went down through Bayview, not the most scenic part of town, and also not the safest especially if you are light of skin. So I went down to the Bay Bridge and walked the portion of it up towards Chinatown where one of the ends was. It ended up being kinda pointless anyway, as they didn't totally shut the streets down to vehicles, some of the MUNI buses that had routes along there were still driving in the "closed" area, so you had to look out for them.

Oh well. I did take some pictures of other stuff, but I forgot my digital camera's USB cable today :)

gas guzzling day

2008-08-31T09:03:00.000-07:00

You would think the one American holiday I could really get behind would be Labor Day, for reasons that should be apparent. However, for the longest time I've just had an off feeling about it, like it's another artificial creation for bad purposes.

Well, guess what, I was right! I didn't learn about this until just now, but most of the rest of the world celebrates the labor movement and workers on May 1st, also called May Day.

The United States used to do this, but then May 1 was re-named the rather Orwellian "Law Day", and moved to the first Monday in September to become the "Labor Day" we have off from work and school (for the most part) tomorrow.

Guess who was the driving force behind this switch? If you guessed Ronald Reagan, in 1984, congratulations, you win a cookie.

slow faux and fine epicurean dining

2008-08-30T10:57:00.000-07:00

So right now, they're setting up the Slow Food Nation inaugural thing at the Civic Center in San Francisco (I can see it from my office window :), which is the most recent Major Crowd-Drawing and Hotel Price Inflating Event in the city (during the June-October summer period there is one pretty much every single weekend)

I am sympathetic with the stated aims of Slow Food, but I am also pissed off because it hasn't even really started yet and already four "Green Yuppie" motherfuckers have already almost hit me while illegally turning in crosswalks on their way to park ... you guessed it ... at the Slow Food festival grounds. Each time, it was some prim, stick-up-the-ass dude with a Sensible Haircut and a Sensible Car like a Toyota sedan, not even bothering to look at me to acknowledge that, if my reaction time and situational awareness hadn't been so good, he might have just merrily run over another human being in his hurry to celebrate himself by gobbling down $30-per-plate Vegan Delicacies or whatever.

I think this event makes a good illustration of Benevolence For Profit, which is the calling card of the Left Rulership in this area. I've been around these motherfuckers for years now, first in Boston, then in their capital stronghold of the Bay Area, and I can lay out for you what this is really all about.

Let's look at the disparity between the stated aims of the organization, and what it actually ends up being.

a) The Stated Aim (or, Noble Intentions) - Healthy, pesticide free, organic food for everyone on any budget, grown locally, with fair compensation for producers

b) What It Actually Ends Up Being - Local farmers charging what the market will bear, which, in affluent Liberal areas, is fucking ridiculous, in order to take advantage of Green Yuppies and the new breed of "Parlor Pinks" looking to indulge themselves in a way that also gives them a sense of ablution for indulging themselves.

Thus, this event is really only for people who can afford to drop $200+ per week at Whole Foods anyway, which, in my eyes, makes it a sham and kin to Bikram Yoga and New Age spirituality and a million other feel-good scams used to exploit pleasure-and-forgiveness seeking Left Coast elite.

.....

Oh, the other thing I was gonna talk about was my cafeteria at school. I feel like such a Bourgeois when I eat there (it's my only option on certain days other than packing a dry lunch, as I have an hour wedged between classes all morning and afternoon).

Anyway, yesterday's lunch - Broiled Rock Cod with some sort of cream sauce and parsleyish stuff (sorry, I've never been Economically Privileged enough to learn what all this stuff is), mixed "summer vegetables" and garlic bread ... for less than five bucks. Less than what most fast food "value meals" cost around here. Now THAT'S what Slow Food should be, but at the Civic Center and Fort Mason ... well, you gotta pay $20 just to get in, and once in I don't think you'll get much more than a bagel or scone for $5.

battle of east and west

2008-08-25T08:51:00.000-07:00

For the sake of getting it straight in my own head as much as anything else, let me break down this new theory of the American power structure that I've been developing over the past week or so.

(Dsiclaimer - as always, by that, I mean new *to me*. It's probably been articulated somewhere else, but I read pretty widely of the "radical" circles, and I haven't seen anything quite specifically like this articulated anywhere as of yet. If someone out there can pass on a link to something similar, please do - I would really prefer not to reinvent the wheel)

a) The usual thinking in "radical" or "independent minded" circles is that right-wing Republicanism is the true ideology of the elite, the real central force behind the corporate power that directs global society, and that the left-wing Democratic movement is basically kept around and artificially propped up to serve as a false opponent, so as to diffuse the power of the masses and preclude organization that leads to a weakening of the present dominance hierarchy

b) My theory goes exactly in the opposite direction - for at least the last 40 years or so, it's been the left-wing ideology that has been more in line with the true agenda of the ruling elite, and while there certainly are religious bigots and whatnot out there, the Republican right-wing party is largely an empty construction, a giant paper monster used to create bitter divisiveness in the population, and to direct everyone into the control systems of either "right" or "left". Most of the prominent right-wing figures, politicians and pundits, are basically just performance artists - they don't believe a whit of the ideology that they espouse, as evidenced by how many of them you see getting caught up in gay sex scandals, drug scandals, child sex scandals, etc. Deep down, I'm sure they know that they are well-paid performers for the Social Lie, and are probably actually perversely proud at how well and for how long they carry off their acts.

c)Thus, American politics for the last four or five decades has essentially been a long-running game of "good cop/bad cop". You get a long stretch of "bad cop", a Reagan or George W., wherein the social safety net is hacked to ribbons, corporate interests are openly catered to, war is mongered, crime is cracked down upon, etc. After a stretch like this the American public is left clamoring for the "good cop" - in this case, your Obamas or your Hillarys. The "good cop" actually continues to advance the program of the elite while in power, which is fundamentally no different from the moves the right-wingers were making while they held the power seats, but they use a smokescreen of conciliatory gestures that make them appear populist and aligned with the "middle class" and the "working class" - the key is that none of these gestures actually challenge the dominance system or the true holders of power. This is evidenced by the reign of Bill Clinton - liberals, particularly moneyed ones, were delighted that he got the Presidency and look back with nostalgia at his reign, but what did he actually do? He kneecapped labor in this country with NAFTA, he picked fights in the Middle East, he sent his pitbull Janet Reno to use tanks on civilians in Waco, he paved a smooth road for the 1996 Telecommunications Act to pass ... do I need to go on? I believe you get my drift.

d) (more to come later ... I have to get to class at the moment)

(ok i'm back now)

d) So essentially, the elite program is that of neo-liberalism through and through. They use the dodge of neo-conservativism, publicly managed by trolls like Cheney et. al., as a means to make power moves that they really need to make while shunting the blame and ill will toward this specific neo-con group. Then, when the neo-cons are run out of office, supposedly all is well again (but they won't actually be hung out to dry for their actions ... they're too good of soldiers to be paid off like that ... this is why Pelosi and the other upper-level Dems always about-face on pursuing impeachment and criminal charges ... it's all the same team in the end.) Regardless of how radical/populist the Dem who gets in appears to be, however, the program will be business as usual.

e) The political spectacle is literally for world power, so don't underestimate the means and lengths that the controlling elite go to in order to manipulate it and effect their desired result. I now think Obama is one of what I call their 'stable' - types of politicians that they breed specifically for certain circumstances. In this case, the circumstance is that they didn't foresee enough to circumvent ten years ago that the internet would become such a tool for information dissemination and investigation of the truth. You might say it's because a lot of the controlling elite are old motherfuckers who don't quite 'get' technology, but what I think is more likely is that they overestimated the level of American apathy and brainwashing. Remember back around 1994-1995? Were you getting online then? If you were, you know that the only games in town were AOL, and similar services like Compuserve and Prodigy; direct internet dialup connections were little operations run out of basements and the backs of computer parts stores for the most part. I think the elite assumed that everyone would connect to the internet through some filtered 'gatekeeper' like AOL, and thus content would be controlled in the same manner that it is in television, radio, newspapers, etc. Instead, people got so into it they actually put forth the effort to learn how to get a direct, unfiltered connection and use all the related hardware and software, the technology followed the money, and now it's just too big and free and chaotic to 'take back' all in one fell swoop. Anyway, the point is, the internet is a large part of why Obama is now likely to become the next President. Without it, people don't start to unify and find out that people in other regions actually aren't all that dumb/scary, a lot of fallacy goes by the wayside as it can be fact-checked by nearly anyone, and you've got the potential for serious fucking revolt to be organized on a wide scale. That combined with the 1999 WTO protests must have put a scare into the elite like no other, because instead of ratcheting down harder and harder, they make a big show of ratcheting down, then throw the (fairly substantial) conciliatory bone of Obama to the public. Obama comes out of the old "Chicago school" of politics; there's no way you go through that system, get the endorsements and backing that he's gotten, and not be a "team player" in the elite system of rule. I think it very likely that Obama has been groomed by the elite to be exactly what he is right now; a way of continuing their program without the threat of organized rebellion, making just enough concessions that they have to in order to skate by and keep America dumb and asleep.

That's my theory at present.

I think my next step is to create a list of fairly obvious questions that potentially poke holes in this theory - a "What If" list, so to speak - and use that to test it rigorously against reality. I'll be back with that in a few.

vitriol addiction

2008-08-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

It's funny how the universe moves sometimes.

I've been a fan of Bill Hicks for some years now, but for some unknown reason I happened to listen to a couple of old routines I have on my mp3 player a couple weeks ago, and since then I've been digging into his unreleased material and stuff.

As it happens, just about that same time, Russell Crowe indicated that Ridley Scott is making a biopic about Bill, and he's playing the role. Apparently filming is on hold until March of next year for some reason, however.

...

Inasmuch as I can like mainstream Hollywood actors, I've always liked Russell Crowe. He seems a little more like an actual human being than your typical "Hollywood heartthrob" male lead, and he has a certain gravitas in his performances you don't usually get with same (check out 3:10 to Yuma for good example.)

Yeah, he drinks heavily, and punches people sometimes, but I'm pretty sure I would too if I had that level of fame irrevocably put upon me.

Anyway, this all relates (sort of) to something I've been thinking about lately.

School started for me this past week, and as it turns out I've got a bunch of classes that are very heavy on "class discussions" and interactive participation.

During one such class, I forget exactly what the hell we were talking about, but some kid started up on, as he put it, "those nitwits who don't believe in global warming."

And at that moment, I thought to myself - Now here is a man addicted to vitriol

I was thinking to myself, you know, who the hell are you to call anybody in this world a 'nitwit'? Are you a geographer? Are you a geologist? Are you a meteorologist? No, you're just some goddamn strident West Coast kid who probably has the sole qualification of watching the Al Gore movie to base this on.

It is immaterial whether or not theories of global warming are provable or not. Most likely, they are right, and at the very least, it's a great idea for all sorts of reasons to pollute less, conserve more and harness wind and sun energy. But that isn't the point.

The point is that this kid didn't do this out of any real passion for an issue close to his heart (because, seriously, no theory of "global warming" has been irrefutably proven yet, and not only that, even if it is in play, we have yet to see tangible results that directly impact our quality of life at this point in California in August of 2008.) There's no way you get that pissed off over something that's as of yet so distant and vague.

No, this kid was doing a "P.C.", left-wing version of the sort of thing that Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage listeners do - identify a demon-enemy, project all blame onto them, and then lash out at them in what amounts to a selfish, cathartic exercise for your own gratification. It does nothing to better the world around you. It is masturbation, pure and simple.

.....

Growing up, growing as a person is about seeking out and accepting hard truths about your own failings, and, rather than denying them, working to change them.

I am guilty of the addiction to vitriol, right here in this blog and everything else I've written. So is just about everyone else that I know. Anger is fine when placed correctly, but when done just for self-pleasure it is complete bullshit and inexcusable behavior. Regardless of how "eco-friendly" or "progressive" your righteous wrath might be. And, I am fairly certain at this point it is something to work past.

The postmortem book that attempts to summarize what Mr. Hicks was all about is called "Love All The People", but I don't think you have to do exactly that, and anyone who says that they love everyone is probably lying to themselves or mentally unhinged.

However, Bill commonly mentioned in his routines that we all needed to move together towards the light, and there, in a way, he is right. In terms of building a better life for everyone, a better human experience, it really is a case of us either all getting there together, or no one getting there. Excising vitriol, I believe, is a step along the way.

That said, identifying a very real trend of oppression and injustice, and calling out those responsible for their behavior, is both right and necessary for the same reasons.

So, you end up with a tightrope to walk, really. The difference, I think, and this comes back to the themes of truth and honesty I've been on for some time now - the difference is in what you can prove and what you can't. Sometimes, that "proof" has to come down to a series of inferences, since the facts you really need are locked away and buried by conspirators. If you identify specific targets, avoid unclear generalizations (for example there is a very real "elite owning class", but what is a "nitwit who doesn't accept global warming"? That's tantamount to saying "Everyone who doesn't agree with the scripted ideology I've decided to subscribe to is a nitwit"), and if you denote working theories properly as theories, I think you will basically end up doing good. And also try not to hate other people too much for being confused humans. Some of them need a strong crack on the head with the Zen Master stick, but nobody needs a gang-rape.

That's what I believe, at least for now.

the puppet on the left is more to my liking

2008-08-23T12:07:00.000-07:00

As it happens, I didn't hear about the whole Obama VP thing yesterday when I was writing that post (just saw it on the news sites this morning). If you had any illusions as far as what Obama was really about all this time, and what interests he is primarily going to serve during his presidency, they should be completely gone by now.

Any prominent Democrat, like Obama, makes for an apt visualization of how the Left end - the end that is more in line with the true ideology of the ruling-class elite - of the whole false Right/Left dichotomy really operates. Obama particularly, with his selling of the trope of 'change' (always vague and never precisely articulated in the form of concrete social programs) in order to rally mass grassroots support, and then turning around and conducting political business as usual as soon as that phase of the plan was over. My "Obama as concession/trojan horse theory" which I advanced here some months ago seems to have been a pretty close guess to the truth - it's a little bit off, though, as I represented Obama as a political outsider being pressured gradually to fall more and more in line with the elite program, whereas now I think he's pretty much been with this program from the beginning. In either case, the ruling-class elite have noticed that we are becoming increasingly discontented with the Social Lie, are beginning to use the internet to communicate with each other about it on a broad scale, and are generally becoming a threat to their carefully crafted system, particularly with a massive swell of direct action congregating just to their south in Latin America. So their response has been to send in a "minority" candidate, espousing the "change" that everyone is so hungry for, and thus co-opt countless numbers of potential radicals and dissidents from moving in an active way against the money-and-power hierarchy. They are also, simultaneously, attempting to ratchet down on our ability to communicate via the internet, which explains Obama's major backpedal on the FISA vote, among other things.

Here's something that's key to how the New Money empire operates - they throw bones out constantly, so as to co-opt all these people who begin to awaken from their slumber and start fancying themselves as "progressives", and harness the power that would otherwise be directed against them. They throw bones out constantly - "progressive" tropes that make people feel good, and are things that society genuinely needs, but do not actually threaten the power structure or the function of the corporate-dominated global economic engine.

One example - gay marriage. Doesn't really affect anyone but gays (irritates redneck fundamentalists, but they could just choose not to care about what other people they'll never meet are doing in their personal affairs, so it really has no involuntary impact on their lives.) Doesn't address poverty, abuse of power, etc. But makes everyone involved feel "good" and "progressive" and "on the right side".

Another example - "green energy". This one is a little more complex - first of all, it threatens oil interests. However, those oil interests could easily shift their vast amounts of capital into whatever the new energy trends are, dominate them, and continue to make hassle-free money off of them. Frankly, I think the contention that "the oil industry suppresses energy developments for their own profits" that you hear in left-wing circles all the time is so logically unsound as to be ludicrous. You see a huge new market opening up, you have a ton of capital and the infrastructure to actively dominate it, what do you do as a business? Do you shift and dominate it or do you run some idiotic "conspiracy theory" program to try to suppress it? The "conspiracy theory" angle makes for gratifying storytelling but it also makes no real sense at all. No, I'm pretty sure at the moment that the whole "we are running out of oil" trope is a mass-media-conducted conditioning program to get people to accept living at a lower standard than what they have become used to, and also to make a push for implementing broader nuclear power usage, which will in turn necessitate a greater "anti-terrorism national security" push of increased surveillance and reduced free movement. I also think the price fluctuations are too suspicious and convenient to upcoming events that they aren't being centrally controlled in some way. "Green energy" might have the potential to shift some of the major players somewhat, but it doesn't fundamentally change the game - it would if the old-line Old Money "force-over-force" approach were in play, but New Money counts on their program of bribes and brainwashing before force, which has been working incredibly well for them for the last few decades.

My understanding of the rule of New Money would not have progressed to this point had I not lived in the Bay Area of California as a homeless person, and particularly not directly experienced the rule of Gavin Newsome over the city of San Francisco. Being here has provided me with the empirical evidence to really be able to visualize the left-elite ruling strategy in it's totality (Gavin, in many ways, is the face of New Money - just wait until his grand designs for the governorship and then the Presidency really get underway.) If one wants to understand it one only needs to look at Marin County, or the city of San Francisco, or trendy little "quaint bedroom communities" in Sonoma County like Petaluma or Sonoma - in many ways this is the power center of New Money - and see how the economy functions in order to puncture the illusions that New Money veils itself behind. These economies have a shortage of affordable housing, and ridiculous "median incomes" approaching something like $90,000 per individual. The working class cannot afford to live here, yet they have huge "service economies" that require a ton of ill-paid labor. So how do these top-heavy economies function? Immigrants stack themselves like cordwood in "market rate" apartments that are willing to look the other way, homeless people juggle jobs while living out of shelters and SROs and their vehicles, and ghettos are maintained just outside the main areas of finance and luxury living (see Oakland, Richmond, etc) from which laborers can reach the "service" areas via public transportation, but are kept at a far enough distance that they do not contaminate the "wealth bubble" in which the New Money beneficiaries wish to live. Thus this third-world-esque "service economy" of Morlocks hides just below the surface, while the beautiful members of the New Money classes meet at their bistros, and sip lattes and Chardonnays, and congratulate themselves on what good souls they are because they have purchased "carbon credits" and a $6 scone made by a local artisan from "organic" ingredients, and put a "War Is Not The Answer" bumper sticker on their vehicles.

Not to say that sustainable energy and gay rights are not important. These are all things that society needs to move to, and New Money is willing to move to them. New Money is also willing to let races, creeds and genders other than white males have a greater share in the power system (they pretty much have to now, as the racial control tropes affect less and less people every year, and "white" people become more and more of the statistical minority - but look at who has all the money, and makes all the major decisions that affect the world, and you'll still find nothing but fair skin.)

But New Money is still about domination, it is about the right of one person to exploit the labor of thousands to live a lavish life while those thousands go hungry (you think any of these millionaire candidates really want to give up their millions? You think there's a way to make millions without exploiting somebody?), and you are lying to yourself if you believe that Obama, Hillary or any other member of that hierarchy really gives a damn about you and your life.

false dichotomy

2008-08-22T14:32:00.000-07:00

I've found that when I am in a very stressful environmental state for a few weeks or more, and then I go into an almost completely stress-free state for a day or two, not only do I feel better and more healthy than I do at any other time, I also tend to have the most clarifying/helpful ... I don't want to say "revelations" because that sounds pretentious, and it's never anything that other people haven't figured out before (it's just new to me) ... let's say "realizations", where a collection of loose facts and observations that have been tumbling around in my head like clothes in a dryer for awhile finally fall into place.

Aaaand, I see something that I realize should have been obvious to me well before now.

I'm sure we all know by now that the Left/Right political clash is artifice, spectacle for the purposes of energy diffusion and control.

Bill Hicks was only partially correct. It's not the same guy holding the two puppets, but the same family, and it's an inter-family power struggle for who is going to rule the hierarchy and who is going to impose their preferences upon the system. On the Left, you have the New Money - those who have made their fortunes relatively recently, mostly using new technological means. On the right you have the Old Money - the New England/New York-based families who rose to power on the shoulders of the original corporations and robber-barons around the turn of the 19th century in America. This is the class that has traditionally ruled, and they must cling to means of traditional rule or invalidate themselves - religion, cultural conservatism, the fetishism of military and violence, and so on.

Again, none of this is "realization", this is all old hat.

What finally struck me, as I was laying out in my cheap hotel room last night flicking through the news channels and watching them simultaneously harp on McCain's houses (in the case of the ostensibly "left wing" stations) and the little missing rich white girl du jour of the moment (in the case of the ostensibly "right wing" stations), is that this battle was actually concluded long ago - I would say as far back as the 1970s or perhaps even the late 1960s.

New Money has been in control since then. So why do "conservatives" seem to be the central power force in the country? Because they are, for the most part, an artificial creation. Not to say there aren't some that don't really exist, nor are there not rednecks, racists and religious zealots that prop them up throughout the nation; but, largely, they are only still around and still perceived as such a cultural "force" in America, simply because this endless battle is necessary for the functioning of the Spectacle. They are propped up artificially, through corporate money and corporate-owned mass media, to be the "eternal enemy".

This is done to diffuse the energies of the mainstream of America, whose personal and political thought is a lot more unified, and a lot more fraternal and egalitarian, than the mass media would have us believe.

Aside from the incredibly dumb and the incredibly psychopathic (I count the religious "fundamentalists" among this number), we all want pretty much the same things and feel pretty much the same way. That's not good for the tiny minority of controlling elite that suck out the life-energy of the planet to fund their lavish lifestyles and their fevered power trips. Specifically, it's not good if people figure out that we all feel pretty much the same way - because then they start doing things like coming together, forming powerful unions and lobbies, marching on Capitol buildings, organizing wildcat strikes, etc.

That's the primary role of mass media - to cultivate this spectacle-battle, and to prop up the eternal demon-enemy of Right Wing Conservativism. Truth is, it's effectively been dead since forever, and what we see now as moves "to the right" are not right-wingers consolidating their power, but the ruling left elitists coming down off their collective highs and realizing that they are going to have to co-opt quite a few of the traditional tactics and practices of Old Money if they are going to keep this abusive, hierarchical status quo in place.

The "left wing" rules because it is more in touch with human nature. Nobody actually wants to live in the severely moralistic way that right-wingers propose that you live - particularly not rich people, who have access to pretty much anything they can think of whenever they want it. They want drugs, they want booze, they want lots of loose casual sex, and like Rush Limbaugh, they want to fly to the Caribbean on their private jets to take advantage of "sex tourism" as an opportunity to fuck children, among other various and sundry "sinful pleasures" that they take their public stands against. We think of the biggest corporations, the forces that actually direct global society, as inherently "conservative", but man, there is no way right-wingism can actually, realistically survive in the world of the ultra-rich. It is just too contrary to the established biological functioning of the human manimal. The evidence does not line up at all.

So in a bizarre way, ol' Rush is right - there IS, in fact, a "libuhuhruhl mediuhr conspiracy." It's just that the "conspiracy" is to create and prop up characters like him, so that people will flock en masse to the Democratic party rather than organizing themselves independently, and thus may be used to further the overall agenda, and have their energies dissipated in service of elite rule rather than in attacking it.

I have more to say about this, but I don't know how to organize it just yet, and this post is already turning into a mess. To be continued, probably.

the international hobo student

2008-08-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting post by a guy from the U.S. who has been travelling the world for the last four years as an international student, doing a semester here and a semester there in various countries. He's planning on another four to eight years of this as a grad student.

The catch? He's getting himself into apparently quite massive debt with student loans.

If you don't ever plan on coming back to the U.S., or settling in one place for very long, though ... well, I'm not suggesting anything. Tum te tum.

new book on the way

2008-08-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

I'm expecting to release a new book shortly, probably by the end of the month. It has one more proofread to go and maybe some final adding and subtracting, then PDFization and formatting, then it will be up on Lulu. Oh, and I'm sketching the cover to it myself, which is what is taking the longest since I fail at Art. But no one else is gonna do it, y'know?

It will be what the Brits call a "slim little volume". 100 pages-ish, maybe less. That's all I felt was necessary, though. I don't read unnecessarily long books and I don't write 'em either.

As far as the subject matter, it's not about Boring Old Homelessness this time, so maybe more than ten people will download it. You remember all that spouting off I did a few weeks ago about truth and honesty? Have you seen an otherwise inexplicable button appear on my sidebar in the last couple of months? One might put these things together and come up with something.

Same deal as last time - free download (HTMLized version this time, with each chapter on one page for easier reading), .PDF for a small donation (probably $1 due to length), paper copy for ... I dunno, I have to see what Lulu tacks on for their costs yet, but I think no more than $7, again given the length.

when the whip comes down

2008-08-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty surprised that Yahoo News is the only place I've seen this story mentioned so far :

Arkansas town institutes 24-hour curfew, gives police power to question and search anyone without cause, in the name of combatting a rash of crime

Isolated incident in extreme redneckville or early precedent for future America?

don't bother coming back

2008-08-05T10:40:00.000-07:00

If you leave the U.S. for whatever, here's another good reason to consider never bothering to come back

Apparently about a month ago the totally-not-Orwellian-at-all "Department of Homeland Security" decided they have the right to seize, without warrant or even any reasonable suspicion, basically any electronic device and any written/printed material you are carrying on you. They can just take whatever, ship it to "another location" for god knows how long for "analysis", and never give you one reason as to why.

If you are just ducking into Mexico or Canada for a spell keep this one in mind. And consider just staying, maybe.

Great Moments In The Tenderloin # ... um ... 12

2008-07-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

Heh been a minute.

Here's a double dose since it's been so long!

A) Doing my laundry at 7 AM, sitting at the front of the laundromat lookin' out the window, I see a beefy tranny hooker with completely unshaven legs and a very short skirt parading back and forth. Just as I think, "Dude, this at 7 AM on a Sunday, no way" a late-model sedan pulls up, the t-hooker engages in brief conversation with what appears to be a svelte Asian gentleman, then enters the car and they drive off

B) This morning I bop by Jack In The Box on my way to sit down by the water and uh ... look at the water, to get a couple of those $1 egg sandwiches (which they have sneakily raised the price on since my last visit). Anyway, right as I come in there's some row at the counter. Manager lady is bawling out a short, potentially homeless-looking guy for some reason and tells him to leave the store. He asks why and she says "I don't have to tell you why". Dude is remarkably quiet and polite through all this, so I still haven't a clue what the hell happened prior, but he moves off to the side and they continue working people's orders while the manager goes about her business behind the counter. Dude just kind of stands there for about a minute flat, comically vacant look on his face, obviously wanting to say something in retort, and after a minute of processing he comes up with - " ... If you don't like your job, why don't you LEAVE IT!" (repeated twice). Upon further exhortations to leave he stops for literally about 30 seconds, with the same glassy look on his face (you can see the smoke rising from his ears), then finally comes up with " ... yous a PUNK ASS BITCH!" before exiting stage left.

one last mention of "dropout-doomism" ...

2008-07-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

... and then I'm done for now.

Aside from the need for greater skepticism when it comes to all these wild claims about Crash Scenarios (and not letting your behavior get swept up in them), the other thing I'd like to get out there is that I don't think many of these folks are taking into account the (extremely important) need to learn how to be genuinely sociable and happy living amongst a wide range of different people - something, unfortunately, you can only really learn by being in the midst of society, and not living alone or with some already-converted friends out in rural land somewhere.

My fear is that people are not facing down their personal Demons and Issues and getting them under control - shoving that aside in favor of "rewilding" skills and "becoming valuable for the new order of things" and all sorts of other activity based on what is still speculation ... and that also strikes me as simply a re-chanelling of typical capitalist-trained thinking (becoming "valuable" as a survivalist/primitivist instead of building a resume and becoming "valuable" to the corporate culture ... and in both cases ignoring, too far to great of a degree, coming to grips with yourself and developing the ability to be completely honest and objective about what has happened to you to this point, what is going on with you and why you do things the way you do them. A new form of reality- and self-avoidance, in other words, just with a tinge of anti-authoritarianism and all that to make one feel better about it).

ok soapbox off for a bit. I got books to write and nonsenses to do. Plus I feel like going for a good hike here as soon as the weather gets a bit better.

"the main menu of a businessman"

2008-07-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

from merFee on Flickr

better journalism

2008-07-17T09:49:00.001-07:00

Here's a minor addendum to what I posted yesterday that might clarify where I am coming from:

I am entering, at present, my second full year at school. During my first year I was sort of just drifting along; doing it for the grant money, really, with a declared major of English, chosen only because it was a subject already quite familiar to me and due to some vague plans to teach the language in other countries as a means of escape from the U.S. if I end up wanting (or needing) to.

However, about mid-March of this year, I had an epiphany which caused me to change both my major and my overall focus in life. Drifting was OK for a short time, and gave me a much-needed break from the rigors of homelessness, but as I approached the end of my first year (with concomitant draining of my reserve funds) I became more and more troubled by the question of "where should I go from here", or, "Am I charting the wisest, sanest and healthiest course that I possibly can from this point?". I was of course very uncertain about the answer to these questions, so I decided it was time to seriously take stock of things and figure out what all of this would be leading to.

I decided that what I was doing at present - living a catch-as-catch-can "raccoon" existence on the fringes of modern industrial-civ society - was both tenable and afforded a lot of free time (along with the pleasures that go with copious free time), but on the whole has actually been so far a fairly lonely and sometimes demeaning and frustrating life. To my thinking, the best way to live is to be a part of some sort of real, functional and reciprocal community. Sadly, such utopias are few and far between, if any exist at all. So the dilemma really becomes this - how to live in the midst of the present social tide without selling my principles short, helping to build the prisons and chains, but yet still "contributing" to the general betterment of life in some way?

Well, I thought, let's make like the high school guidance counselors always did, and take an inventory of skills, abilities and interests, and see where we wind up from there. I am not excellent at anything, really, though I do passably to very well at a number of things. My greatest skill at present is probably that I am more literate and eloquent in the use of the English language, particularly in writing, than the American average (though that is not difficult to pull off given the abysmal plunge that standard has taken over the last few decades). It seems writing and communication are what I occupy the majority of my time with, and also what I am most keenly interested in. My next-best skill and next-greatest interest is in sharpening and using my ability to observe and perceive things that are either concealed or not readily apparent. These two interests have dovetailed together, and led me to spend most of that copious free time that I have had as a homeless outcast in plowing through the contents of several libraries, attempting to put together as much of the unfettered truth about human existence and affairs as I can.

All of this led me to the epiphany, which oddly enough happened as I was playing a video game to relax, that what I really do best (and am most interested in) is investigating things with the purpose of identifying and explaining exactly how and why they work the way they do - with a particular emphasis on human behavior and sociological structures. To me, I think, this is more fascinating than anything else, and what I believe has unconsciously been a sort of calling that I have been developing (sometimes unknowingly) all of my life to present.

So I switched my declared major the next day. To sociology? Haha, no ... to journalism!

But wait ... isn't journalism hopelessly corrupted and useless, more or less merged with public relations and advertising in one Pravda-like blend that serves state-corporate power? Yes, for the most part, that's absolutely right. However! There are, even in these times, journalists who still make their way, get their work out and even make reasonable livings while still pursuing the truth - practicing journalism in it's original, uncorrupted form.

I would like to have the resources of the police investigator at my disposal, but I have no wish to do police detective work. I do think tracking down murderers and such is something we will always need in some form or another, but in present form the police come with far too much state-corporate baggage. Your job is primarily enforcing the social order as dictated by the elite, and then preventing crime and serving true justice comes in a distant second to that, really. Plus, I really dislike guns and violence.

Instead, I am thinking independent investigative journalism, in the tradition of what Upton Sinclair used to practice, is the way to go.

But enough about all that. I mention it only to explain my point about the "drop-out" culture, which is that there is really a lot of room for improvement in intellectual rigor, thoroughness, discipline and honesty. It is a relatively young movement, relatively poorly manned, very fractured and scattered ideologically, and since it largely only talks amongst itself, it is unused to scientific fact-checking and standards of solid case-making when it brings forward it's points.

The ONE thing I have seen nearly everyone rallying around is the Civ Will End Soon meme, as put forth by the people I critiqued yesterday, and that is why things like the "Collapse Reddit" crowd bother me so much. I fear that people are setting themselves up as the new High Priests Of Doom, and perhaps not even intentionally. But I see a lot of wild ideas being flung out there and presented as factual, not because they have been thoroughly tested and proven, but because they sound appealing and mesh well with the perspective that the writer has already chosen for themselves. A whole lot of people are guilty of perpetuating this - the sort that you can find all over the "Collapse Reddit", who have the de rigeur Serious Business picture of themselves looking solemnly into the camera next to their articles. There is a fine line between where truth and honesty ends and wish-thinking and self-aggrandizement begin, and a lot of the Collapsers are sliding all over it without much apparent regard.

So that's it, really. I want to bring a journalistic, hard-facts-only-please, standard to the movement. Thus far I have not seen such a thing. "Drop-out" culture ranges on one end from hedonism and slackerdom (not that I necessarily find too much wrong with either of those basic principles) peppered with a little Buddhism or similar spiritual-metaphysical nonsense, moving toward the High Prophets of Doom and Survivalism on the other end of the spectrum. The whole thing bears quite a bit more investigation and honesty than it is presently getting, I think.

if you are not up for reading a lot of horse shit

2008-07-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

... I posted a few pretty new pictures on my Flickr page (link is over there ->)

on dropping out

2008-07-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

I've been a social dropout for about five years now, although the first two I really didn't define myself as such (and spent a good deal of my time trying to chip my way back in to society).

I'll spare you the violin, but as a kid, I lived in a state of almost perpetual emotional abuse. Some people get stronger and become better people as a result of that sort of thing, but I had the opposite reaction. I was steadily becoming a fairly horrendous human being - though I don't think I would have quite reached any remarkable level of notoriety, my painful childhood was shaping me in pretty much the same way that similar upbringings shaped the lives of any number of serial killers, spree shooters, dictators and prominent business tycoons.

Through a series of coincidences too tedious to recount here, I ended up joining the military in a sort of misguided and naive attempt to 'redeem' myself. The military could never do that, of course, nor was 'military discipline' the answer to any of my problems. But as it happened, the military was what 'radicalized' me. Up until September 11th, 2001, I was apathetic and almost completely uncaring about politics, history, society and general human affairs. When the attacks happened and the subsequent wars were declared, I was in a position where I was at a 'high deployment' military base, and suddenly the political manueverings of the power elite became very relevant to me personally. As I began to learn exactly who these rulers were and why they were so hell-bent on sending me to uncomfortable desert climes where I would stand fair odds of being suddenly exploded, I also began to discover ... well ... just about everything else there is to know about how society and civilization really work. And, thanks to a small group of close friends who have been better to me than I've ever deserved, as well as a couple of saintly women, I began to learn to give a damn about other people again. It would take a few more years, but once the first cracks appeared, the dam inevitably had to come down, and the military, which was supposed to break down my will and make me a good conformist, ended up having the complete polar opposite effect.

That's more or less how I decided to "drop out", in a nutshell. My path to this decision is unique, but then, so is everyone else's. There is no one 'correct' way to drop out of society, and anybody that militantly insists so is trying to sell you some sort of bill of goods and should be regarded as thoroughly untrustworthy.

And that is the reason why I am writing this post today. After years of wading amongst it in both real life and on the Internets, I find that more of the "dropout culture" disturbs me than not. I commend anyone who reaches such a level of personal empowerment and intellectual liberation that they decide to define their own terms in life. However, simply reaching this point does not make you a walking Bodhisattva in and of itself - and in a more disturbing trend that I see even more frequently, many people have not in fact become intellectually liberated or independent at all, but have simply swapped one set of preconceived notions and dangerous faith-based beliefs for another, all the while convincing themselves that they are now both utterly free and utterly correct in their thinking.

The immediate impetus for this particular post was the discovery just the other day of a collapse Reddit. In and of itself, this is "who cares" material. First of all, the Western industrialized social norm, as we know and have gotten used to it, is in fact visibly and indisputably moving toward the early stages of collapse. This does not, however, mean that it is 100% guaranteed to collapse - and if it does collapse, there are so many ways that it could all shake out that it is completely impossible to accurately predict a sequence of events. That, of course, has not stopped anyone from going ahead and doing so anyway, which includes about 95% of the articles and sites linked to on that "collapse Reddit".

The various groups of "Doomers" have become a sort of new religion for the otherwise spiritually disaffected. How many times has Kunstler been dead wrong so far? Matt Savinar? And I hate to bring him up, since I both enjoy his writing and he has gone out of his way at times to disassociate himself from the 'doomer' culture (even though he really still kinda is one anyway), but Ran Prieur has been wrong so many times over the last couple of years that there is really little reason to believe he has any reliable insight into the future workings of the social mechanism. There have even been, in the last few years, some credible refutations of the gospel of Hubbert. And yet all kinds of people continue to hang on their every word, and the specter of Imminent Civilization Collapse Due To Oil And Food Shortages basically looms over nearly every single "drop-out" figure or movement that exists in the English-speaking world.

The problem with the whole Peak-Anthropik-Quinn-Rewilding-Primitivist crowd is that there is a lot of personal wish-thinking getting blended in with hard fact, and the two have become so jumbled in so many cases at this point that they are very difficult to separate. I hate to pick on Ran again, but he is the only one I read on any kind of a regular basis, so thus the one I am most familiar with - he's said repeatedly that a personal fantasy of his is riding horses down abandoned interstates and all of that. That's exactly the sort of thing that is a major problem with this whole crowd. When you 'drop out', you usually disassociate yourself from both general cultural patterns and the mainstream media channels. That's a good thing, generally speaking! However, it also puts you in this sort of 'positive feedback loop' - particularly if you publish a blog or something espousing your philosophy and thoughts on the social question - where you lose touch with most everyone but people who have decided to invest themselves in seeing things your way. Having only this sort of input has the effect of constantly reinforcing your preconceived conclusions as correct without a whole lot of rigorous analysis and fact-checking. My worry is that a lot of people are getting lost in that, to where it is skewing their ability to accurately assess what is actually happening, and what is really the best way to respond to it. And fantasy-thought, like the whole 'riding horses in the ruins' thing, starts to supersede rationality.

There is also - and I am very hesitant to bring this up, but I feel I must - there is also a profit motive here that generally goes unexamined. Kunstler sells books, films and lectures. Savinar does even more so. And, sorry to drag you out yet again Ran, but you do solicit donations, and receive some rather sizable ones at that. Somebody has to ask the question, you know? The only way you can possibly keep an honest bead on people is by examining the contents of their pockets. "Doomism" and post-crash fantasy sells very well these days.

The other thing that makes me suspicious about "crashism" and "doomism" is how easy it is on the individual. It is, essentially, a fatalist mentality - this is all destined to happen at some point in our lives and there's not a thing we can do about it, so why bother to work to try to turn anything around now, just buy crossbows and take permaculture classes and live in a van and wait patiently until the grid goes down and all of that. Additionally, if you try to change anything within the present framework, you are guilty of "aiding and abetting" the present system of rule and become some sort of ideological traitor and pariah.

Let me make one thing unequivocally clear at this point. I do not like the present industrialized capitalist system at all. I think it is simply the next tyranny in the line from the fall of monarchy in the 1700s, the rule of merchants rather than despots or pontiffs. I do not believe that it can be reformed from the inside while holding its present fundamental structure. There are little tweaks we can make to make it easier on the poor and more generally egalitarian and peaceful, but there is no way to adjust it from being fundamentally selfish and evil, and thus some entirely new social arrangement must at some point be developed.

Here's the thing, and this is where I part ways from about 90% of the 'dropout crowd' - I don't think it is ultimately in *anyone's* best interest for there to be a 'hard', or even a 'soft' crash. I think in both cases people are seriously deluding themselves about how things would work in those scenarios. They would be a lot harder, uglier and more unpleasant than anyone would care to admit to themselves - except for the masochists, sadists and rage-consumed that would enjoy that sort of thing in their own twisted way.

The gospel generally accepted among this crowd, as far as social progression goes, is that of Quinn. Let me try to summarize briefly here for those who are unfamiliar - it goes something like : "Humanity began with a sustainable system of tribal hunting-and-gathering, kept in check by 'erratic retaliation', until some tribe or another developed agriculture, which allowed for surpluses of food, which in turn both allowed a warrior class to rise and created a system wherein food had to be kept from people to keep them working, and because this system expanded so aggressively and allowed for the development of so many various distractions and amusements, it has become the dominant system of human living and now threatens to kill us all. Only by letting it 'crash out' and returning to some sort of tribal system (and this is where the theory always gets uncomfortably vague and unfocused) will humanity have any hope of building a better and wiser society. Provided we can keep records of what we did right and wrong without also keeping technology, which would start the whole cycle over again."

'Quinnism' rejects the idea that any present system of government can work, because they are 'utopian' in nature, and require people to be 'better than they ever have been' in order to work. Quite right. Democracy would indeed work well if we actually had noble, honest and community-minded leaders. But we have power-hungry greedheads instead, so it fails more often than not.

Here's the thing about this argument - and this is just Ryan Garou, homeless blogger and perpetually obscure author speaking, in my ever so humble and non-Turner-endowed opinion, so take it for whatever it is worth to you - Quinn makes two major mistakes. One is that he overstates the case. We do not have to all become 'walking Buddhas' for a reasonable system of government to work. We only have to bring ourselves up to standards that there have been many, many, many precedents showing that we are perfectly capable of, given the right environment and influences. I am not going to delve too much into this right now, as it is both kind of complex and also part of a book I am currently working on (which will be free to download). But if we manage to do such rather simple things such as not abusing our children, unplugging the television and going out of our way to not expose ourselves and our children to advertising and other influences that most of us are now well aware are mentally corrosive, and take some other reasonable precautions and make some other quite doable lifestyle changes, it is my thesis that we could very well see remarkable improvement in the human animal within the space of only a couple of generations, particularly if we make wise use of the internet as a global information dissemination tool. I really believe it is a nihilistic cop-out to say that we are irredeemable and face no choice but either complete annihilation or reverting to shaking spears at each other and raiding each others camps as a way of life (it is apparently the sort of thing that gets Ted Turner to fork over quite a lot of money however). There are too many examples out there to the contrary. My other issue with Quinnism is that it is simply impossible. We have crossed the point of no return with nuclear technology. There is no way that all of this unsafe and powerful material can be left alone long enough to decay into unusability short of complete and sudden wipeout of the whole of the race. That means 'new tribalism' is a virtual impossibility, which leaves us only with the extermination scenario, which is a really shitty option, and rather makes one not want to bother getting out of bed in the morning.

We are, I am afraid, stuck with some form of Big Government if we are going to survive and carry on. Therefore, I say, let us do it in the most sensible way. Let us start from where we are - corporate oligarchy masquerading as democracy, and do our best to transition to true democracy with socialist leanings through a combination of level-headed direct action (blowing up Starbucks does not qualify as level-headed, as personally gratifying as it may be) and political process. Then we will transition, slowly and gradually, to true democratic socialism. Then, possibly, libertarian socialism. Then maybe anarcho-socialism. We take all these steps very slowly, and - here's the fundamental thing - we make raising nations of considerate, healthy, and sane people our foremost concern, while also making a concerted effort to dispose of our most dangerous and unstable weapons. We won't see it happen in our lifetimes, and not in the lifetimes of our children, but if we proceed wisely down this path we may eventually be ready for cooperative communal anarchy, with small-scale self-sustaining true communities that have absolutely no reason or desire to go about hassling one another and acting like jackoffs.

The alternative is to scrap everything and start over from square one, and we have already seen how that turned out. I think it is a far saner policy to try to change people's minds about things.

That's what I believe, and it's not something I see articulated very often by anyone. It's something I came to through my own reflections, experience and study. I don't claim to be right, nor do I want to press this particular view on anybody (though I do want to get it out there for general consideration). This is where my particular path has lead. I've used many other people as guides along the way for certain spots, but if I had dogmatically followed them without question, I would either be spinning in circles or over a cliff by now - as would anyone be if they took everything I said as gospel and followed me in such a manner (not that I have delusions about anyone doing so), since I guarantee you a percentage of everything I've said just now is either wrong or there's some important fact or three that I've missed along the way.

If I followed the doomers I'd be crouching in the bushes somewhere with face paint on , furtively munching berries and glancing about like a squirrel ... and I'd be the only one, since there's almost none that are actually walking the walk that they talk on the interbutts.

......

Wasn't I talking about dropping out at some point?

Though I have just got done advocating working within the present society to some degree, I still think 'dropping out' is the best choice for many people right now. What we have to do is redefine 'dropping out' from living in vans, writing rehashed 'damn the man' screeds and loafing all day smoking weed with traveler kids, and instead finding, forming and working with local communities to get to a state where we are as liberated from the evil aspects of society as possible. Yes - I said it - 'work', that word you all seem to hate so much. Personal improvements are not made and worthwhile things do not happen without some measure of personal discipline and active application. As independent forces we have more power to exert change on the whole. This is the program for industrialized first-world nations ... I think the relatively few fundamentalist regimes and dictatorships we still have will come along through natural processes of intermarriage and information dissemination in due time, as seriously, no one really wants to live in the midst of that sort of thing, no matter how full of bullshit the leaders fill the heads of the people.

You just have to be very careful as you go. Nobody ever gets anywhere new by following trails other people have beaten already, but it's a great way to learn the skills you need to recognize a new path when it presents itself.

jubilee, jubilee

2008-07-16T10:27:00.001-07:00

A few posts back I trashed holidays in America. This is because the bulk of them are rooted in nationalism, glorification of religious suppression, or simple commercialism.

One holiday I would like to see celebrated again, which has both a Christian and materialist root, is Jubilee. Jubilee was celebrated every fifty years (based on a centennial schedule), at which point all slaves and prisoners were released, debts forgiven and sins wiped from the official holy record.

Various Catholic Popes have actually formally continued the Jubilee tradition throughout the years, including Pope John Paul II in 2000 - though, naturally, he overlooked the insistence on the freeing of slaves and prisoners and the relinquishment of debt.

Though the "cleansing of sins" aspect has continued, Rome was actually the first society (after it had become an empire) that insisted on removing the cancellation of debts from Jubilee. Plutarch, along with some lesser lights in the early AD historical and philosophical circles, theorized that Rome's refusal to cancel debts was a major cause of its downfall - creditors, thus empowered to take over the economy wholly, choked the life out of it.

so much for the Glory of the Free Market

2008-07-12T10:14:00.001-07:00

Keep shit like this in mind the next time some business prick starts yammering about "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps"

anger is shockingly common in the workplace!

2008-07-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

... well, shocking if you are the Mainstream Media anyway, and thus wrapped up in a bubble of perpetually supporting the Social Lie.

The only thing shocking to me is that there isn't more rage - we're talking about a system specifically designed to dehumanize people, crush their dreams and train them to suppress emotion and live in a perpetual sort of moral schizophrenia between the values of what they believe personally and what they are forced to do to support the companies they work for. And millions of people, from K-12 schooling on upwards, get processed through it and have been for decades now. We won't even mention working conditions, which are reverting to what they were pre-1930, except this time with "ergonomic chairs" and weak coffee.

And the media wants to act like it's shocking when people act out, get rude and snippy, and occasionally tote an AK to the office.

This is why the papers and the major news websites should be used only as a source of occasional comedy.

for the war, against the war, who cares 500 posts!

2008-07-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

For this arbitrarily important numerical milestone I decided to conduct a sort of sociological experiment here on the ol' Blogger.

My highly observant ass just recently noticed that on the Blogger profile page, if you click on one of the little keywords you've put in as your interests, it takes you to a list of everyone else out there that has that same interest.

So I decided to page through my interest keywords and make some sociological observations about the groupings of people that come here and set up blogs.

Here's what I came up with :

1) Agnostics tend to forget about and abandon their blogs within six months to one year of starting them. They don't seem to bother deleting them, though.

2) Anarchists post a hell of a lot, and seem to mostly be male

3) Taoists are nuts

4) Only 310 people like pancakes WTF?

5) urrryone in San Fransisco is GETTIN HYPHY

6) pretty much all of San Francisco is gay, too

7) Upton Sinclair readers are overwhelmingly female, and there's not a whole lot of them overall

8) Ed Abbey fans tend to be into taking a lot of pictures and there are some cuuuute girls among them. This surprised me, I was expecting a lot of bearded old Unabomber guys

9) I *think* Blogger lists people by how recently they've posted; then again it may be how recently you've added that particular keyword to your profile. Amazingly I seem to be in the first page of results on almost every list except for the music stuff.

10) There's a few Traven fans but almost none of 'em write in English

11) There's a hell of a lot of Orwell fans and they seem to like puppies and rainbows (?)

Make of all that what you will. Maybe some scientists can put it to good use.

(Oh yeah, if you tracked me back here because I left some random comment on your blog while I was rambling around, don't be afeared. I am neither a stabbing nor singing hobo.)

this is why i love google news

2008-07-09T07:44:00.001-07:00

(from this morning)

flag waving day

2008-07-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

I didn't go watch fireworks. I don't go out for damn near any major cultural holiday anymore - they're pretty much all contrived bullshit, and the celebrations are all brought to you by Pepsi, VISA and Sprint to boot. Only one I bother with anymore is Day of the Dead, which we fortunately can enjoy here due to the large Latino population - a celebration that is simply about remembering the dead and acknowledging death as a part of life without fear. Thanksgiving is OK, I guess; it's about the English settlers having a peaceful dinner with the Indians or some bullshit (prior to the settlers gradually running them off their lands, slaughtering them and boxing them into reservations where they are now largely drinking themselves to death), but I don't think anyone even really remembers the specifics except for grade-schoolers. For all practical purposes it has just become an excuse to put on a massive feast and commiserate with good company. As such, I'll take it when I can get it. Otherwise holidays in this country can pretty much go jump as far as I am concerned.

July 4th has become one of the more tasteless and offensive ones to me as of late, however. Over the past few years I have become gradually more and more aware of the duality of the words "freedom" and "independence", the dirty back sides to those terms that somehow didn't make it into the lessons we all learned at school.

"Freedom" here is, and always has been, the freedom to starve if you will not dance to the rich man's tune, and the freedom to be clapped into irons if you protest or act out against the established hierarchy. Prior to the French Revolution, it was always a tyrant of some sort giving you direct orders as to what to do; now, under the rule of the Merchant Class, there are no direct orders, but the only avenues by which to provide for yourself are rigidly controlled by the elite, and if you will not conform to their standards, you will simply be locked out of the pantry and left to die in a ditch. That is the freedom of the "free market".

"Independence"? Independence from Britain, sure, which was probably a general improvement in situation. However, it ended up being about the independence of the landed gentry, and their right to rule the land instead of the Crown. What does "independence" mean now? Rugged individualism. That "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" Randian shit that inheritance babies, criminals, back-room colluders and scam artists fill the heads of the nation's poor with, keeping them self-destructive, snarling at each other over crusts, and ultimately impotent to really improve their lives.

But what about all the wonderful things that "only could have been made possible in America"? Economic privilege and the forces of Big Business have been in the way at every turn. We have labored for the tolerance, liberty and equality we have for too hard and too long - we should have had it sooner, and we would have more of it now, were not the forces of class privilege actively impeding it's development in every way they possibly could.

Do not tell me that I should be thankful for America because of the few good things that have developed here. That is like arguing I should be thankful for religion because it sometimes feeds soup to the poor, meanwhile overlooking the astonishing amounts of murder and war, the systematic physical, emotional and sexual abuse of children, and all of the other longstanding ills it has inflicted on humanity. It is an argument fit only for jingoists and morons. We could have developed positive social values and systems of egalitarian social justice much more rapidly and effectively if we did not have to labor under the weight of laissez-faire capitalism and the unquestioned right of the rich to be rich, just as one is perfectly capable of living by positive humanist values (such as the Golden Rule) without the dead weight of religious ritual, mysticism, priestly castes, and nonsense codes of behavior and conduct.

And this is where the jingoists and morons belt out - "Well I'm PROOOUD TO BE AN AMEEERICAN, WHERE AT LEAST I KNOW I'M FREEEEE!" To paraphrase one of Steinbeck's characters - don't trust any freedom that is "given" to you, most likely there is something wrong with it, and examined from the inside out it is not really "freedom" at all. It is not that we are truly free here, it is that we are simply less visibly oppressed than much of the rest of the world. Note I do not say "the rest of the world" - countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and even Canada have vaulted ahead of us in that regard. Boasting about how our limited collection of "freedoms" outsizes that of Asian dictatorships and fundamentalist Muslim regimes is so fundamentally pathetic I cannot even bear to speak of it anymore.

So, no, I didn't take in the fireworks show (brought to us by Coors Light and Aflac). Nor do I plan to take in any more at any point in the future, at least not for the 4th. I'd rather turn in early and have a good sound night's sleep. I need it for dealing with what day-to-day life in this country has become.

can a brother get a roof over his head?

2008-07-03T10:11:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me on the train ride home yesterday that in just 2 months I'll have been on this Grand Hobo Experiment for 3 years now. Yep, it was September 1, 2005 that I hopped a train from Boston to California with everything I owned in the world stuffed into a backpack and duffle bag.

I came here largely because I didn't know what to expect out of being "homeless" and, if it came down to where I had to sleep outside, I wanted to be in a temperate and fairly predictable climate. I picked San Francisco over Southern CA simply because I'd always been really curious about the city and I figured hey, if you can go anywhere, might as well go somewhere you want to go.

The climate-based decision turned out to be a wise one, but I was going over in my head all the different ways I've spent the night during my "homeless" life, and after tallying it all up it seems I've actually been indoors a lot more than I've been outside.

I don't have all the exact numbers, as I tend to swap situations roughly every 3 months or so, but this is a pretty accurate breakdown of how I've cumulatively spent the last 34 months :

* 12 months in homeless shelters
* 12 months in barely adequate housing (SRO rooms, mostly with no kitchen available)
* 6 months camping outdoors
* 3 months in adequate housing (renting a room in someone's house with kitchen, adjacent bathroom, laundry, etc.)
* 1 month "miscellaneous" (sleeping on trains and buses, staying up all night at coffee shops and such, generally passing the night without sleeping)

.....

As I've mentioned before I am looking for a place to live - a REAL place to live, not another crack-smoker SRO - for the upcoming school year. After that I'll probably take a year off, or transfer to a school outside of San Francisco.

It's tough finding a room to rent here. I could do a shared apartment, but I prefer a spare room in someone's house. In any area this situation is already tough due to finding roommates that aren't psychos and assholes, but of course here it is kicked up a notch due to the massive wealth disparity in the whole of the Bay Area.

When most people go to market with a room they don't think, "Hey, I have this spare room, maybe I can help out some low-wage worker or college student who needs a decent place to live while also getting a small break on my own bills". They tend to think "OH SHIT LOOK AT THE MARKET RATE RENTS HERE WE CAN GET HELLA MONEY FOR THIS WALK-IN CLOSET FROM SOME KID PLAYSTATION 3 HERE I COME WOOOO", and then they go on Craigs List and demand nearly what people are charging for one-bedroom apartments plus thousand dollar security deposits and all of this other nonsense.

Here in San Francisco, it isn't even so much a shortage of available rentals, as it is the attitudes of the people renting. Up in Santa Rosa, still an affluent place, but with a much lower population and a more "rural" style, I rented a room in someone's house for 3 months through Craigs List. One day I decided I was sick of being in a shelter, I didn't want to go back to camping out and try to juggle school with that, I had about $3000 saved up in the bank, and then literally about five days later I was going to the house to meet the dude who would end up renting to me. No muss, no fuss, no security deposits, no "first and last", no shuckin and jivin and smilin real big, just two people getting to know each other and then a handshake and a beer and that was it, I was ready to move in. I only left that place 'cause they ended up selling the house, at which point I perhaps somewhat foolishly decided to come back here to SF for awhile and get myself mired in this city nonsense again.

Down here it's all different. First, people have these nutty lists of demands they put in their ads, like personal shit that no one would even dare to ask in any other quarter of civilization. Then they pull inflated security deposit numbers out of their ass, which is totally in the hopes of scamming you somehow and getting you to forfeit it to them, or so I assume. Or they may just be doing it because they see everyone else doing it and figure, hey, it's the thing to do, and it's San Francisco, where the motto is "Get Rich Or Get Out". Then they assume that everyone answering the ad is a heroin addicted baby-raping serial puppy-kicker, and to prove otherwise you have to have a 9 to 5 job and also three "local personal references" who, for all they know, could be three dudes in rehab programs who happen to have cell phones.

The situation is completely insane, but as the late George Carlin aptly put it, it's about "the illusion of security ... making white people feel safe".

Anyway long and short of it is I could use some tips on how to get myself housed reasonably for the year around here with some sane housemates, preferably of an anarcho-socialist (or at least fairly leftist) bent who won't be scared if I'm not wearing Dockers and Gap clothing. I'm keeping an eye on CL but I don't have any reason to expect that will become any more fruitful than it ever has been. I can do weekly hotels for awhile at the beginning of the semester but hell if I don't get access to a proper kitchen. That's the biggest thing, you know - I can spend next to nothing on food if I've got a place to store it and to cook, but most of the SROs don't have refrigerators, and there's only so much cooking stuff I can sneak into them (and so much space on which to cook and prepare stuff). Some days I'll be forced to eat out all day, spending $15 or more on food just for the day, and the whole time thinking to myself how much I'd rather just have some of the rich lentil-and-bean stew I used to whip up for about a buck per hearty serving.

So anyway yeah, if anyone stumbles through here and can help a hobo (who is basically the ideal roommate, since I never bug anyone, don't smell, make no noise or messes, and am seen about as often as the average ninja) out into a decent, affordable living situation, give me a jingle by e-mail (river_fireflies at yahoo), I'd greatly appreciate it.

media control

2008-07-01T13:58:00.000-07:00

You've probably seen this story floating around about a British kid who wrote 'fuck off' as the answer to an essay question at school and was given 2 points for it.

The only remotely interesting thing to me about this is the fact that no one running the story has asked the kid why he did it.

eeease on in there, homosexual

2008-06-30T15:49:00.001-07:00

lololololololololol

YOU eat a dick, corporate oligarchy! YOU eat a dick!

2008-06-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

Ran Prieur just posted a link to a good Salon article about the baseless and failed 'move to center' technique that has already failed the Democrats in two presidential contests running now, and that Obama seems to be edging towards now, with all this FISA stuff and other little bits of soft-shoeing lately.

Maybe the FISA thing can be written off as an isolated incident, and we'll actually see some delivery on the promise of Change with a capital C. This isn't trending in a good direction for the beginning of summer, though. Even if he does continue down this route, I still don't think Grandpa Abe McCain will pull out a victory (without cheating), simply because he's just THAT goddamned unlikeable.

However, at this rate we'll wind up with this for President :

When what we really need is THIS :

find hungry samurai

2008-06-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

San Francisco may have originally built its wealth and fame on the back of the Gold Rush and intercontinental shipping, but its cultural capital comes entirely from the period known as the San Francisco Renaissance. From about 1950 to 1970, an active and organized counter-culture opposed to the values that rule the American social system found it's footing here, collected a following and bred poets, artists, writers and musicians that would transcend the underground and become a part of popular mainstream American consciousness.

These poets, artists, writers and musicians were largely fleeing from the New York establishment, going as far across the continent as they could to establish their own outlets for their work and their thought. It didn't take but a couple of decades for the establishment to catch up with them, however, and when it took over the city, it planted its symbol of conquest, the Transamerica Pyramid, right at the base of North Beach and situated so that the symbolic center of the Renaissance, City Lights Books, would be in its shadow.

This sort of thing inevitably happens anywhere that people with spirit, intelligence, talent and good energy gather and begin to build something special, something that might actually change the world. Pretty soon the word gets out, and there are always plenty of gadflys who want to be around it who do not have any particularly remarkable amount of spirit, intelligence, talent and good energy - but they do have money, plenty of money, and the buy their way in one way or another, and pretty soon Business sycophants are right there to cater to them with trendy and expensive clubs, bars and bistros, and before you can blink the area is Gentrified.

Then the sort of people who made the area what it was in the first place either sell out to the moneyed hordes and become lap-dogs licking their cream, or they are simply priced out of the area and must move along.

Poor City Lights is still where it always was, and selling books that are about as radical as one can hope for from modern publishers, but it is hemmed in at all sides. To the south and west the whole neighborhood has not just been Gentrified, but also Touristified, the images of the writers and the thinkers and the jazz players who made the area what it was now prostituted for the picture-taking delight of Midwesterners with fanny packs and slightly confused Euros. To the East are the industrious, inscrutable and utterly indifferent Chinese, doing their own thing as always and not giving a damn about whatever happens to be around them. And of course, to the North is the new center of power in San Francisco, the Financial District, with it's triangular engorged penis triumphantly jutting toward the heavens.

..........

After dismissing the city as a "nightmare" two years ago, and leaving, then returning, and now planning to stay for one more year yet to finish up at a school here, I have to ask myself what I am still doing here.

The city is almost wholly in the hands of the Enemy. Something like 1/3 of the total city population now makes an income that exceeds $100,000 per year. The armies of gentrification are on the move and will give no quarter - every month you read about new social services being slashed, rent control protections being voted down and stripped away, low-cost housing bought out and converted to condos. The city motto has become "Get Rich Or Get Out".

And somehow, this has all come to fascinate me more and more the longer I stay here. I feel like San Francisco is a front-line skirmish, albeit one that we are losing badly, and as such is a microcosm of what is happening to America as a whole. I cannot resist being among the detritus, documenting what is going on.

I make no pretense of fighting very hard to make San Francisco any better, or to stem the tide of gentrification and self-obsession that has nearly overwhelmed it. Writing anti-establishment screeds that hardly anyone reads is, I think, not accomplishing much of anything except serving as cheap therapy for me.

However, I have always identified with Kambei of the Seven Samurai, the "veteran of many battles, all of them losing". No matter what situation I happen to be in, I always survive, but I never feel that anything has really changed for the better. I'll survive this too; likely, a year from now, I'll transfer to another school somewhere else, or just take a year off from school, and leave this city. If I ever come back there likely will be no room left for me, or anyone like me, at all.

I know I would be happier somewhere else, but here I find something that is not so easily found most anywhere else - the truth of what America is, and what the world is becoming, with only the thinnest veneer of hypocrisy covering it from the outside. I feel like a correspondent; I have become addicted to the front lines.

Whether I fail to fight, or fight and fail, there is at least a fight to be found here; not the drugged, somnambulant, suburban existence under which this country has allowed itself to be stolen away and fenced off by the ruling class. I'll stick around for a little while longer, and take notes.

OHIA 2nd Edition is now available

2008-06-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

On Homelessness In America, 2nd Edition is now complete and available.

Chapter VI : Divide and Conquer is the major new addition to this one, adding about 60 more pages to the total. As promised, you can download the whole thing here in .DOC format absolutely free of charge.

If you'd like to make a donation, you can do so by going to my Lulu page and purchasing the somewhat-easier-to-read .PDF version for $2.50, or a paper copy for $9.89 (plus whatever Lulu charges for shipping, probably $2 or $3). Each PDF purchase puts $2 in royalties in my pocket, whereas the hardcopy only nets me $1.60. Lulu eats up the rest of the money for printing costs and their own profits. (Lulu actually lets you set separate royalty amounts for the downloads and hard copies now, which they didn't back in 2006 when I first published the book, so I adjusted the royalties down a bit on the print version to keep it under ten bucks).

This book isn't a money-making enterprise, I would really rather just that people read it and talk about the ideas in it, and get more informed about how poverty actually works in this country. That's why the .DOC version is free and always will be. However, I am still homeless myself, with no real prospect of economic stability anywhere on the horizon (at least not until I finish college, which is about 2 more years away). I'm not gonna play the violin for you, my situation is really not all that bad - at least, I don't consider it to be. Most people would find my life pretty spartan and possibly even kind of depressing, but I'm actually pretty happy most of the time, and all my basic needs are fairly easily taken care of. However, I do have to find somewhere to live in this expensive-ass area for the upcoming school year, as I can't do homeless shelters and camping with a full-time school schedule all year long. So a donation certainly helps, and will be put to good use. It also frees up more time for writing, since it's less time I have to be running around finding ways to hustle up food, hygiene concerns, the rent, etc. Anyway, I appreciate it if you do, but don't feel obliged, is my main point.

Anyway, if you do read it and give it some serious thought, I'd appreciate your comments. I don't consider the book "finished" by any means; it is and has always been an introduction to these issues, and I'd like to continue to hash things out on the blog over time. So come back and leave a comment or two if you'd care to, and thanks for reading.

can't escape the gay

2008-06-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

Here in San Francisco we have the big Gay Pride Weekend festival coming up here in a couple of days, followed (I assume) by Pride Week, where more such festivites will ensue.

I have been to Market Street during the notorious Pride Parade, and this weekend, I will be over across town at Golden Gate Park. Seriously, I went down to one a couple years ago in an Adventuresome mood, just curiosity to see what kind of a spectacle it was, really ... and in the space of an hour I saw way too many roaming, naked, hairy "bears", some of them publically masturbating, which is to say "one or more". Anyway, yeah, I'll be across town.

This upcoming event engenders me with a need to speak out on an issue that I am usually quiet on, and am afraid to bring up to anyone I know here, for fear of being called a Gay Basher and all that. The thing is, I'm fine with whatever anyone wants to do behind closed doors, I'm fine with whoever wants to marry in whatever configurations, even if you want to change your gender I basically can't see any objection to that. But as a wise old black man I know put it the other morning, "Man, I got nothin' but love, but I can't get near that".

It's great that San Francisco is this haven of sexual tolerance where people can come and be openly whatever on the street. That's fine and dandy. What I take umbrage at is a certain subsect of the gay male population here, who take "tolerance" and shove it way over the border to "open harassment".

Seriously, men in this city can get away with doing and saying things to other men that, if they went up and did the equivalent to a strange woman, would at least get them a faceful of mace and a knee in the balls, and likely would end with a few nights in jail if they continued to press the issue.

To be honest, I really don't think it's too many of the locals. I get the feeling it's these little affluent "party boys" that cruise into town from who knows where, and think that San Francisco is just one giant Gay Fest and that it's open season on any and all men that happen to be here.

Thing is, of course, some of us have no interest in boys whatsoever. Some of us kinda lead rough lives, we grapple with tough stuff all day most every day, and when we are headed home at all speed, feeling grumpy and tired and wanting nothing more than to get some dinner and flop in bed, the absolute LAST thing we want to have to deal with is some random tranny cruising up to us on Market Street and saying "What's yo name? You wanna get yo cock sucked?", or having some car of "Castro Cruisers" wheel up and yell "Heeeey! Do you liek booooys?!", or have some dude tell you when you walk into the library elevator that he hopes it gets stuck (implying, apparently, he intends to rape you if such an event occurs), or having some random guy come cruising up to you outside the library and go "Oooooh, TWINK!" while staring at your ass.

Someone needs to speak out on man-on-man sexual harrassment, because it is kind of uncharted territory for our society. Most places if you tried what some of these dudes try here in SF, you'd have your ass kicked by every surrounding man within the space of ten seconds. Now they have this "tolerant" haven, but some of them seem to equate "tolerance" with "okay to engage in stalky/creepy/rapist behavior".

I guess most dudes would be afraid to compromise their masculinity by admitting they get unwanted sexual advances from other dudes, but since I am psuedonymolicious here, I guess I will take it for the team and introduce the subject for popular consideration and discussion.

Seriously, it is not cool to go into the gym, and find right near where you locked your stuff up there are three shaven young dudes who stop talking and start eyeing you up when you go to get your street clothes out. Or, when you mistakenly join the YMCA thinking it will be a normal gym and expecting other people there will conduct themselves with civility, finding out that the men's locker room is actually a "bear pit", seeing hands go for camera phones when you even walk anywhere near the shower, and having some dude roll up on you with his junk all in your face when you are trying to find your locker. Call me old fashioned but that's how I feel.

It never crossed my mind that this would be an issue when I came to SF. I mean, I knew about the whole Gay Mecca thing, but it failed to register in my mind that the way that obnoxious hetero guys act towards random women on the street might also be the way that obnoxious homo guys act towards random men on the street, at least in a city where they think they can get away with it. Nearly anywhere else in the U.S., homosexuality is still closeted and kept on the sly for the most part. It's nice that you can be open here in San Francisco, but the price is that a bunch of the gay dudes start acting like complete and total antisocial asshats now that they think they are safe from reprisal.

Anyway, I'm still a fairly young dude. Been looking increasingly worn out over the last couple of years, but I've historically attracted attention from the ladies pretty consistently. I never worried about that being a problem in this way though, firstly because my conception of how gay men acted was totally based on the way they acted in traditional intolerant communities, and also because I'm on the bum, and even when I'm indoors I tend to not worry about my appearance at all, wear old baggy clothes, etc. Well, that's good for driving off the ladies as I have discovered, but unfortunately I did not find out until I got here that one of the major gay fantasies is "rough trade", or good-looking but dirty and worn-out young dudes who they think will give them sexual favors for money and etc. I'm pretty sure that's what the song YMCA by the Village People was secretly all about, and also there are a bunch of heroin/crack addict kids here that make their way doing stuff like that.

Again I should say that I am not anti-gay in any way. I have met hecka excellent gay peeps in my classes and even in the shelters and soup kitchens and stuff, who were perfectly civilized and knew how to conduct themselves in a respectful manner. It's just this limited group of over-testosteroned jackasses that are a drag on the community, just like a group of over-testosteroned jacakasses cause some women to think that "all men are pigs". I am just anti-gay-guys-hitting-on-and-harassing-me-when-I've-done-nothing-at-all-to-indicate-I-want-any-kind of-attention.

Fair enough?

Anyway thanks for listening Internets, I had to get that off my chest. Not too many girls check me out anymore but these two girls today followed me down Van Ness for a few blocks and took pics of my butt with their camera phones. Unfortunately I think they were like 14 or 15 at absolute best, but still, it mollified me a little. Anyway catch you later, I'm going into hiding until the weekend "cruiser cloud" blows over and the hell outta here.

all of my heroes are dead

2008-06-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

I got the news about George Carlin yesterday morning, charged up my mp3 player in the afternoon and listened to You Are All Diseased last night in tribute.

I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.

rofl

2008-06-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

I was just skimming Yahoo news articles online while I waited for some bum to stop shoulder-surfing me for my password (they think they're slick using reflective surfaces behind you), and I had to share this delicious roffle that I just happened across.

From a study on people increasingly using the internet for unfiltered political speeches and information -

Yet they have mixed views about the Internet in politics. Sixty percent of Internet users fear that misinformation and propaganda are widespread online and that too many other voters are trusting that information.

You mean, like, as compared to television and major newspapers?

Ohhhhhhh roffle! Thanks for the invigorating morning laugh guys

the backstop

2008-06-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

I was reading a short biography of Kenneth Rexroth the other day and I came across this passage -

"As for the limits of reformist politics: Hitching through Montana in 1927, Rexroth and Andrée get a ride with a well-to-do man of the world with an unusually cynical opinion of politicians. Rexroth asks if he doesn’t think there are a few honest exceptions, such as Robert La Follette and Burton Wheeler (radical reform senators from Wisconsin and Montana). The man answers by describing the backstop in a baseball field: “It catches the balls the catcher misses, and all the fouls that go off in that direction, so that nobody in the box seats gets hurt. That’s the function of guys like La Follette and Wheeler, and believe me, they know it if you don’t.” The next day they find out that their companion is Senator Wheeler."

I think Barack Obama is our backstop. He is a concession to us by The Powers (by which, as always, I simply mean The Wealthy), an attempt to nip organized revolution in the bud in a time where material resources are being increasingly pinched (note I do not say "becoming scarce"), 8 years of incompetent bungling and misfired world domination plans have driven Americans farther toward "radicalism" (and in greater numbers) since they have since the 1960s, and mass communication (and the ability to spread truth) is still not fully under control (internet) the way all the traditional forms have at this point been reigned in via corporate ownership (television, radio, newspapers).

The hope by The Powers is that budding future radicals will rally under Obama's banner instead of pursuing action more fundamentally dangerous to the hierarchy. Obama has, at this point, offered a lot of soaring rhetoric but not much in the way of concrete specifics. They will make some concessions on things that they can afford through him, but nothing that fundamentally disturbs or seriously threatens their domination. They may then off him at some point like they did the Kennedy brothers, just to remind us that even when things really appear to be going the common man's way, they can snatch it away just like that anytime they care to.

I am a New Cynic, but that to me means pursuing the truth in everything, not automatically assuming the worst of every situation and cherry-picking to fit that view. My hope, my honest hope, is that Obama is himself gaming the system. His record, examined closely, bears marks of integrity and genuine common cause with the workers and the poor. But he must know that The Powers are entrenched so as to not allow him to make it far unless he concedes to their terms. He is clearly a highly intelligent man; perhaps he is pushing the boundaries as far as he can at present, just up to the point that is permissible to The Powers. Perhaps his empty rhetoric is a diversionary strategy; make them think that he is playing along with their program, then, once in the White House and able to consolidate some power, begin the process of truly significant change in the structure of power. Perhaps.

Perhaps he really is just their shill, and will prove to be all talk and little action. I have no way of knowing for certain.

And his election is not even a given at this point, popularity polls aside. The well-oiled and experienced Republican Hate Machine is already primed and attacking at full gear with the smear-bombs. They will almost certainly make half the black, Latino and Indian vote disappear due to "ballot errors" the way they always do. They will likely harass people heading to the polls and pull all the standard tricks. And let us not forget the Diebold machines still widely in use. Crusty old troll that McCain might be, this election is far from given in Obama's favor. It is in the media's interest to make it a dramatic battle up until the last minute, and that is the spin we will see from them, but don't be surprised to see their sympathetic coverage of Obama to date fall flat and reverse itself at the last minute.

And, of course, they might well kill him. I actually think there is less of a threat of The Powers doing this than there is of some unrelated white supremacist group like Stormfront operating on their own kooky agenda.

(Take all this for what it's worth, though - I genuinely believed Rudy Giuliani would be elected up until the day he dropped out of the race. The Powers move in ways beyond my understanding quite frequently).

if only

2008-06-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

is fake good news is better than no good news?

chinese hoboism in america

2008-06-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

"These immigrants live an itinerant life, pursuing jobs in every corner of America. Mr. Chen, who asked that only his last name be used, is a 29-year-old immigrant from Fujian. He was smuggled to the United States nine years ago and has lived all over the country, moving from one job to the next."

corporations funding this years political conventions

2008-06-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

This really isn't anything to be too shocked about I guess, really it's just getting out in the open what we've known for decades now anyway - big business buys, owns and gives the marching orders to both of the major political parties.

thanks for making me wait this long to post this, Hil

2008-06-04T12:51:00.001-07:00

if you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh

2008-05-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

I found the best article on San Francisco ever -

"The city of San Francisco was once culturally and artistically amazing, but now it's so fucking expensive that artists and musicians can't afford to live there anymore. Therefore, don't expect to see any good local bands because there aren't any. Because of the insanely expensive real estate, the only black people who live in San Francisco are ghetto and live in projects. All other Black people live across the bridge in Oakland. So the majority of the population is wealthy yuppies, Azn's, and gays who are either yuppies or Azn. The city is also full of hipsters, but the ones in SF are especially annoying because they think since the city is supposed to be artistic they must be too. Overall though, San Francisco is cultured and a nice place to hang out, if you like hanging out at Starbucks."

From Encyclopedia Dramatica

River of Fireflies

retirement

hobos of the skies

save the ozone by giving everyone cancer

the modern Billy the Kid

Liberal Apple lovers, take note

Great Moments In The Tenderloin # 14

restoring cavities?

dwelling portably

interesting human interest story

favelas in Brazil

good jorb democratic overlords

object lesson - why hackers are fail

sometimes a punk bitch is just a punk bitch

Detroit Crop City

disabled anonymous comments

The Economy as religion

the world's most advanced police state marches on

who goes brownshirt?

murder is a matter of perspective

you can stop the compulsive hand-washing now

a for anarchy

the zombie spectacle

Everett Ruess found?

anarchist FAQ

capitalism as rape

"do as you please" versus "take what you want"

the lolbama compromise

spring cleaning

yooman rights violations

why write?

the watchmen

an indefinite bark

hackerspaces

the scientifically provable holographic universe?

don't fear the reaper

radical cheap

high-tech nomadness

a protracted bark

ho ho ho

Great Moments In The Tenderloin #13

nice erection

Obama and the elite

17 men on a dead man's chest

Paul Broun Godwins the national dialogue, and the Troll Army

hobo on the issues

lol disturbing

oh, boy, this is interesting

lol western PA

"yoah name is Toby!" *crack* "Barack Obama!"

FAQ

terrorist, your game is through

just a thang

oh, and

media control

let it fall

Get Your Bentley Runnin' (dun dun du du) Load Up On Viagra! (dun dun du du)

Poore, Indebted, Discontented and Armed

hold fast

news nuglets

remember that show 'Dinosaurs'? This isn't it.

selling dissent

the dog days of summer

ciclovia

gas guzzling day

slow faux and fine epicurean dining

battle of east and west

vitriol addiction

the puppet on the left is more to my liking

false dichotomy

the international hobo student

new book on the way

when the whip comes down

don't bother coming back

Great Moments In The Tenderloin # ... um ... 12

one last mention of "dropout-doomism" ...

"the main menu of a businessman"

better journalism

if you are not up for reading a lot of horse shit

on dropping out

"yoah name is Toby!" crack "Barack Obama!"