cheese it, the cops!

The Age of the Imbecile...

O' beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They're beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie -- Don Henley, End of the Innocence, 1989 

"I’d bet you’ve thought, shaking your head and muttering, something like: “Jesus. We live in an age of impossibly catastrophic stupid.”You’re not wrong. About a decade or so ago, hot on the heels of the financial crisis, something happened — an old story began to be rewritten, as the world found itself poorer once again. There was an explosion, somewhere deep in the human heart, and a tsunami rippled across the globe — one boiling and bubbling with every imaginable variety of stupid: human folly, gleeful ignorance, self-destructive greed, reckless spite, dim-witted cruelty parading itself as enlightenment.And so now a tsunami of imbecility is rolling like a slow-motion thermonuclear bomb across the globe. Lightning bolts of foolishness shiver down it. Smoke clouds of idiocy billow from it. Here are the five kinds of stupid wrecking the globe — because your first job, these days, as a human being, is to make sure you’re not being turned into an imbecile by this wave of stupid, too". -- Umair Haque, Eudamonia, 3/4/2019

One of the tons of weightless, mass-less but still existent things that cross my field of vision daily is Medium. I like it, because it gives me access to a wide variety of interesting stuff. Kind of a Daily Kos/ Huffington Post for people who have a bit broader perspective. And one of the things I enjoy and learn from is the work of Umair Haque, who seems to be occupying an intellectual space not all that different from Kierkegaard's or Schumpeter or I don't know...Hunter S. Thompson. 

I'd never heard of the guy, and started reading him because he was echoing things I thought, which is scary. Then I googled him...turns out the guy is a highly respected management guru with a meta-view. Which, when you think of it, is a rarity. Now, perhaps sort of a bit of humanist eschatology, which is an interesting concept in itself.

 

Folks  who are neck deep in the struggle to make the world a more humane and human place might gain from his perspective or might find it annoying. Good on you. But, I think that even people trying to save the world might occasionally need a slightly contrarian buzz. As for the rest of us, I think countering the age of the imbecile is a pretty laudable exercise. 

 

I don't know where I want to go with this, but I think it's something people who think about the things they think about can find a better place to put the lever. Invite comments, thoughts, and suggestions...

 

So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
That a really good religion
Is a form of treason. -- "On Banning Bokonon" Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

 

Apropos, perhaps? 

 

 

Papa's got a brand new mixed bag...

 

What do Trump, Washington and Jefferson all have in common? All three trusted treasonous and greedy senior military officers.

At what temperature and humidity will an active human being working constantly actually cook? 105F and 100 humidity. 

Why'd the Russian chick cross 5th Avenue? Suborn treason and possibly get her parking validated after getting a Taco Bowl in Trump tower.

Like I said, a mixed bag in a new post.

Oh, and I actually like Haim. Guess I need to seek help -- seek out

.

 

 

Appointment in Pandemonium with Trump, LePen and Satan

From The Guardian Books Newsletter, January 26, 2017--Poem of the Week 

Slow Food

I would like to feed this child who is dying with slow food,
So that time might stand still for him, so that a grandfather
Clock might not fall apart in his arms. All of the laziness of air

In our warm temperate climate, all the anxious hands
Of young barristers at this morning’s Farmers’ Market,
All of this complete snobbery of the gut, might bear down

Upon one dying child. Here is my Euro, child. Here is
The olive oil and the stuffed artichoke. Here is the conscience
And the conscience money. They stole my land too,

They took my small cottage apart, stone by stone.
They surveyed all of us and we nearly died. I am sending, child,
Very fast Irish food from my evicted great grandmother.  --Thomas McCarthy, 2016

---

Reading this and seeing mental visions of pictures and faces and memorials, I also saw similarities to Alepo and Syria, and Israel and Palestine -- coffin ships, starving refugees seeking something probably inescapable, and a heritage of a horrid night and day...Pandemonium is the capital of Hell, and when the evil doers sit there and plot against heaven with fallen angels and demons, they'll be singing along with venture capitalists, factory farmers, religious bigots and imperialists throughout history. No one's heritage is clean...we should be better. 

So, not being a folk singer, I wrote this article.... We may be the cops of the world but we're really not very good at it. As with so much since the death of Truman, we may mean well but our efforts to make the world a better place end up in an orgy of negative masturbation, doing things that neither feel good nor accomplish anything meaningful. 

 

 

puzzle theory

i'm still puzzled by cnn's incredibly heavy coverage of malaysia airlines 370, built still on such thin info. but i still like the enrich-and-ditch d.b. cooper scenario, and i still would like to know whether there was anything or anyone extremely valuable on that flight, and whether the pilots knew about it.

A new peak in Crusader AXE's productivity

 

I realized recently that I have made several attempts at the blogging equivalent of the unified field theory, that is, following part I of an essay several days later with part II. I just don't usually do that because I'm lazy and easily distracted. 

But the continuing debacle of policy and politics that has prevailed since Bush and the Rehnquist stole the Supreme Court 14 years ago has hit a point where the outrage meter is pegged out here, and it's easy to remember why I was so pissed off the first time. 

I admit that I consider the Republicans in the House and Senate, the leaders especially, to be lower on the chain of consciousness than sunflowers and slugs. But I have absolutely no clue what the President is doing and why...he's a smart guy. OK, got it; so was Herbert Hoover. He's trying to be Kennedyesque, except most of us who remember John Kennedy and Bobby are members of AARP. Being Kennedyesque today comes off as Mike Dukakis. 

So between them, I'm irked. And, this Ebola Czar nonsense is insane. McCain the Rs have a bad idea -- we need a Czar! Long live th Czar!'; Obama appoints one, and they start screaming "Not that one; another one." Meanwhile, we have a very logical CZAR, the unconfirmed head of the National Health Service. Since nobody in Congress is bothering to pretend to do anything, aren't they recessed? Couldn't Obama appoint him? Or at least make him the CZAR? Nah...too easy. 

Screw these people. 

 

tear them down

empathy varies inversely with power. i'd say that's something we all know by experience, though it's nice to have some evidence. perhaps you have actually dealt with high school principals, policepersons, judges, irs officials, very rich persons, or senators, for example. i'd explain it as follows: people who seek power are morally worse, on average, than those who do not (this is true more or less by definition, as though i said: people who try to accomplish evil are worse on average...), and sometimes people who seek power get it, while people who do not rarely do. and second, power makes you a worse person, which is actually the conclusion of the piece. now, if you do not draw anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical - indeed anarchist - conclusions from this, you should try. and what i would really recommend is that people stop lionizing the powerful, worshipping barack a la 2008 or clinton or gore or bill gates or whatever it may be. powerful people should be under continuous suspicion, should be regarded with continuous skepticism. the only real point has to be to hem them in, mitigate their disastrous effects, or tear them down. the human desire to be subordinated just puts us in the hands of the worst among us. that we want the exploitation, poverty, and rape that we receive from authorities, however, does not entail that the authorities aren't evil.

on the other hand, the piece does that silly brain thing, where they say that, though some people think that powerful people need others less and hence attend to their feelings less, the authors have a different hypothesis: 'we contend that when people experience power, their brains fundamentally change how sensitive they are to the actions of others.' now first of all, why aren't those alternative descriptions of the very same thing? and second, what the heck do you gain by retreating into the brain? it's just doing no work. 'my brain is making me less sensitive' or 'my brain is changing me': how much sense or content is there in claims like that? or maybe i am making my brain less sensitive. when my brain affects me (how surprising!), what is affecting what? this same let's say casual line of thought might identify my self with my brain, which would make it very strange indeed to say that my brain is changing me. is it supposed to be explanatory to say the x is the cause of x? but it does suggest that power and interactions with others in general can be reduced to internal brain states, which is just counter-productive. actual interactions of your brain and the rest of you with other people and the outside world are actually occuring. the problem is interpersonal, not intracranial. but if it were in your brain, power and its effects could possibly be treated with drugs or psycho-surgery, which would be good, and might keep us from having to open internment/re-education/labor camps for assistant principals after the revolution. 

 

 

Convergence -- Pope Francis, Tom Friedman, Russ Douthart show up at Ana Marie Cox's place for Maureen dowd's brownies

 Sometimes I publish entire articles here, sometimes I do it somewhere else and just give you the Link. This is one of the later cases. I was struck by a variety of articles over the weekend -- the Pope's interview with a Spanish weekly, Friedman and Douthart's columns and then, of all things, Ana Marie Cox's piece in The Guardian this morning. I normally don't read either Friedman or Douthart and the Pope doesn't have a regular byline at the sites I visit. I religiously read Ana Marie.

Anyway, they were all approaching a serious issue -- what the hell should we do about Iraq kinda, sorta -- and seemed to be going at it from different perspectives and getting to the same point. The Pope's interview really triggered it, when he equated fundamentalism with violence. I think there's a lot of truth to it -- show me someone who wants to quote chapter and verse of everything in an appeal to authority, and I'll show you a guy who'd like to smite the unbeliever...which in Iraq boils down to Sunnis and Shiites smiting each other and anybody else like Christians, Sufis and other sects who wanders past. They all make good points == enjoy.

 http://thedefeatists.typepad.com/apoplectic/2014/06/looking-at-the-elephant.html

 

Gettysburg as metaphor for desperation, ignorance and hope

 

While I might have a lot to say about the Defense proposal which has already been overtaken by events, or the invasion of Ukraine which has really been unfolding since Boris Gudonov's defeat of the Tartars and the beginning of the Russian state, I decided to look at things through something I kind of understand...and Gettysburg is a great example of how badly things can go...and serves well as a metaphor for things could have been better, could have been worse but ultimately, wouldn't change a lot. 

The meeting engagement, which are usually pretty sloppy and deadly affairs, was a draw leaving the union in occupation of the key terrain. Due to problems of communications, coordination and staff work as well as logistics, the maneuver phase trying to take Culp’s Hill, flank Cemetery Ridge and occupy Little and Big Round Tops failed. So, the Army of Northern Virginia was left on day 3 to try a frontal attack, across an open plain with unseen obstacles that would slow, disrupt and canalize attacking soldiers into killing grounds. It didn’t help that Pickett’s soldiers were exhausted; it didn’t make it simpler that George Pickett was a bellicose idiot, lacking even the reptilian sense of self-preservation that Dan Sickles exhibited. 

 

Most patriotic thing sometimes is to scream incoherently and leave

 

In which Crusader AXE reflects on the cooption of patriotism into something more vulgar than an ad for Stars and Stripes Personal lubricant, the nature of nations as Phrog Farms with the help of noted Management Consulting Anarchist Jerry B. Harvey, and points out some personal responsibility through the prose of a better writer in The Guardian. With music. 

 

 

whatever bashes you over the head and buries you in the back yard makes you stronger

it would amaze even friedrich nietzsche, i think, that all murders, disasters etc make a people stronger. cameron and obama go further than nietzsche: what kills you makes you stronger too. we should want things to descend into a completely depraved random war of each against all; then we will have become strong and united indeed. like cameron or obama, i think our best or only hope is complete disaster, and that will be my reform program in the 2016 election.

it's not a disaster, it's an opportunity

now it seems like the main thing about apocalyptic disaster is that it is an opportunity for american heroism. these things always show us at our best, er. we should want much much more.

tammy, reaching into your chest and clutching your heart in orgasmic blood-lust

reviving the tribute to tammy i put down in 'songs about kissing' (below). (that tammy wynette is fucking incredible: my candidate for the greatest pop singer of the twentieth century. her timing is so extreme and devastatingly expressive, playing so far behind and then on the band as though waiting for and then trying to seize the cure or just describing the shape of yearning. that timing is of the essence of country music, and it corresponds to the similarly extreme, the unmatched, dynamics. she's always threatening to unleash a new level of intensity. i don't think the recording equipment of the era could really capture or even survive what she's doing there. it's thermobaric. i will be your vietnam.)

you have to be very early on tammy's recordings. i hate to sound condescending especially to my favorite singer but few artists have more badly misunderstood the source of their own power; she made so many pseudo-sophisticated horseshit songs, starting early, so random downloads is a very bad approach. never, however, has suffering been so intensely expressed in popular music (i'll give you billie, though), but then also transcendence of suffering, or transcendence through immanence. really tammy is being crucified. i would call the cross 'heterosexuality,' or being female in a heterosexual couple circa 1967, and i have no idea why she doesn't play the cultural role played by judy garland; dude it's super-intense, super-tragic, in sequins, and the music is better. it's the campiest thing ever and yet within that tammy is completely emotionally exposed, absolutely vulnerable and devastated. she embodies a perfect submission, but she gropes for modes and moments of resistance or understanding. (if you want to hear systematic resistance, though, you'll have to listen to loretta.) anyway here's a twenty-cut list. i'm just going to say this: these are the best country recordings.

(1) The Ways to Love a Man

(2) Enough of a Woman

(3) Yearning (To Kiss You)

(4) I'm Not Mine to Give

(5) I Wound Easy (But I Heal Fast)

(6) Two Story House (George and Tammy)

(7) Too Far Gone

(8) D-I-V-O-R-C-E

(9) Apartment #9

(10) You Can Steal Me [Album Verson]

(11) Golden Ring (George and Tammy)

(12) I Don't Wanna Play House

(13) Stand by Your Man

(14) Don't Touch Me 

(15) I'll Share My World With You

(16) Almost Persuaded

(17) He'll Never Take the Place of You

(18) I Know

(19) My Daddy Doll

(20) These Two

(21) Where Could You Go (But to Her)

(22) Lighter Shade of Blue

(23) The Ceremony (George and Tammy)

 

 

ok while there seems to be an actual nuclear meltdown, cnn is doing reports on the role of social media and ireports from two days ago. have you lost your minds?

i like the response to wikileaks: seriously they are now invoking the apocalypse, or multiple apocalypses.

Koh wrote that publication of the documents would "place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals" as well as military initiatives and cooperation between countries to confront problems from terrorism to pandemic disease.

obviously assange and everyone else better watch their backs. i don't pretend to evaluate the charges against assange, only of course one has to be extremely suspicious of a frame. it's a small price to pay to avoid pandemics, nuclear warfare, and the deaths of countless individuals (as well as a few pairs of conjoined twins).

let me ask you this: are there any circumstances in which the oil spill would be, roughly, nobody's fault? or is that by definition impossible? what if, you know, they hit a sudden, you know, methane pocket or something that they could not have known was there? or something? or if there was just a bizarre concatenation of extremely unlikely events? what i would say is: you've got to look and see whether anyone was at fault, and if so why and to what extent. but the "it's a fucked-up world" move has to be one of the possibilities. i think rand paul is right, that is, that the whole idea is that we have to hang somebody. we still live for the anthropomorphic explanation: that it has to come back to somebody's greed and evil, who can then be punished; this is just to say that we can't face an amoral material universe. katrina was a beautiful example: it was going to have to turn out to be someone's fault: brownies's, the corps of engineers, the forces of global warming.

now one reason it has to turn out to be someone's fault is that someone has to pay; i mean literally someone's got to pony up the billions. but the impulse is more powerful than that. and working backwards from the disaster, it's going to be extremely easy to see some things that should have been done differently, even if at every moment of not doing things differently, the people involved made sound decisions relative to the information at their disposal, or made the decisions you would have made in their place, etc.

notice i am not saying that no one is at fault. i'm saying that as you do the investigations, that's more or less one of the possibilities. face up. and realize that burning people at the stake will not really expiate their sins or our sins or make the world make moral sense.

i've long argued that there is no - can be no - principled distinction between the natural and the artificial. our pride in human amazingness and distinctiveness - understood theologically or in terms of evolution - is matched by our self-loathing (beautifullly developed in the monotheistic traditions and environmentalism), and we regard our own interventions primarily as destructions. ''pollution' is a nice site of this struggle: pouring artificial poisons of our own invention into a pristine nature. so think about this: the gummy black toxic slop pouring into the gulf of mexico is an entirely natural substance: it hasn't been refined or processed at all; it is the trace of billions of organisms over millions of years; what's going to kill everything is an essence or a remainder of life. all we did was...release it. that is a much better model of us in relation to our world: not standing outside it destroying or conserving it from the heights of consciousness and technology, but issuing slight deflections or articulations of it, wholly from within. if we were to destroy nature (which, i tell you, is by definition impossible) it would be nature devouring itself.