Saturday, July 28, 2012

NYT Gets To Cheer Drug War

More accurately, they get to uncritically report that it's not our fault, which, in my opinion, is a fun delusion. Yesterday's paper reported (or rather, reported that my government believes) that the Venezuelan government is to blame for presumably a huge amount of cocaine coming out of Colombia and into the US. Cocaine demand in the last several years has been lower than it's been in years and years, decades, reportedly, so for the US to make a big deal of this amount is a little suspicious. 


I don't have the whole picture, but it's not the first inverted (perverted?) celebration the Times has done on this subject. Another piece of the puzzle is the way the economics were even allowed to be reported in the first place. It was actually informative, if you look at the graph. Increase in demand happened a few times, and each time without fail, the price went up. The reporter, however, decided that the price going up was like some sort of bandaid, from just being punched hard by our government. 


Of course, both can be true, but without understanding the first, which is a strong, strong hypothesis as I see it, the problem doesn't go away.


Iran Contra and the 2005 plane crash in Mexico suggest the US government is actively involved in drug dealing. Does this reality charted against the Time's delusional thinking allow, encourage, or even give a little more evidence for that I don't know how to test this, we're talking about a black market. So I think a more generous reading is that the war must go on, real problem or no. The polices are admittedly ineffective at stopping wars, is what it is permissible to say. Can't that be reasonably expected from a Power which has a different agenda?

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Where We Went Really Wrong

It shouldn't be a very daring observation that democracy basically won't exist in any meaningful way in a country that was just invaded and had a civil war. I believe this can be traced to political and economic uncertainty. It's here where I think we can start to know the significance of violent personalities. When we look at Iraq, this is also the case -- violence makes democracy very difficult. According to human rights reports, this is the case in Libya too:


...the main hindrance to holding free and fair elections is the deep divisions within Libyan society – a consequence of eight months of civil war


So tragic, because you can tell some people just think you're supposed to fight everything out, or encourage people with more power to do that. At that point, I say you are not applying your mind, or looking at history.

An ex-slave observed after our war to abolish  slavery "...we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food, and clothing, and he held us out of necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery." This same lack of liberty after war is pretty explicit in human rights reports the world over, one example of this in Libya, "thousands of detainees still languish in prisons run by militias, without a formal charge and without any prospect for legal review." 


Most Chicagoans know that violent crime is up here, and there's a new mayor with new policies and a police chief quite hostile to nonviolent intervention. Going back in our history there is a more dangerous time and it's instructive when looking here and abroad. The formation of the KKK was after a much more extreme uncertainty, the civil war. 

The repression lives on though. It's still common here for people to say things like "the red [train] line is dangerous" and I even had a pot dealer who wondered why the cops weren't just targeting black dealers. 

I know these variables don't seem to match up: we had a free election, they had a "free election." But elections are just one aspect of democracy. They are pretty close to the right place to look however. I think if you examine people, influential people, at the root of violence and hate you find a messed up idea of human nature. It's important to get it right because when democracy fails you can get a quite terrible revolution, even with the best intentions. The rise of Hitler, the "revolution" that Marx predicted, was hailed in this country's press as a return to a "moderate," and even someone not from Germany wrote propaganda for his racist cause and contracted with him (Henry Ford). So it seems to me we have a choice. We can love people and condemn violence, or practice it, and therefore love violence and become monsters. It's really that simple. 

So I disagree that the reason we can feel good about war, as my government once said and continues to say, is because "insurgence" is "the cause of human nature."


Here's Barack Obama giving up as well, for example:

“War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease - the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.”


No, Mr. President, not the manner, just one manner. There are others, that come up spontaneously, despite cultures of violence, and sometimes, however, ended by them..:

Polatch:

At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth.

Hip Hop:
At its best, hip hop has given a voice to the voiceless and poverty-stricken worldwide, particularly in inner citiesand neighborhoods suffering from urban blight, and showcased their artistic ingenuity and talent on a global scale.

Orgams:
The period after orgasm (known as a refractory period) is often a relaxing experience, attributed to the release of theneurohormones oxytocin and prolactin

Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Nile Is The Longest River In Africa

Are people going to be more free or less in the future? Open up the New York Times editorial page these days and their are loads of stories about how we're not putting freedom in its place. Heck even a story by the Newsweek editor in chief lamenting the lack of attention span cynically holds a grudge against people paying attention to the Egyptian revolution.

But hey, they're just newspapers. What about someone entrusted with the presidency? Bill Clinton gave the game away that this is power tripping dressed up as science. Before continuing to ruin his own reputation with tainted materials sent to Haiti, he was videotaped telling a TV audience that some corporate hive mind bullshit makes everything okay. The problem, he says, is people don't understand that the elites are actually working in the common man's interest. If only they read some New Age psychobabbler, they'd have a better understanding.



What's so terribly pitiful though, s'that they are allowed not only to research and thereby know things about human nature, but I assume also are trusted to not to really understand them significantly. How else could one discuss the punishing of innocent civilians as a way to reach  "complex, high-order thinking"? (http://www.spiraldynamics.org/war_iraq.htm What a great phrase. If only it weren't surrounded by nonsense. 

Another kind of problem (this is kind of just a hunch) We The People are put into a larger system, not just for control, but for something that clicks with our sense of reason. Like, there's no reason we shouldn't have a thyroid gland, but there is also no reason people's will's should be represented only by how much a graph of their purchases goes up and down. In a simpler way of looking at it, just because a person has a brain and a body doesn't mean the Elites and Laborers should serve those functions. It's kind of like reasoning by appeal to poetry. It doesn't really mean anything, but it feels like it has significance. 


That's really where it's at, I think. These are superstitions posing as critical thought. Rational thought hurts people's tribal brains. I mean, you can actually become a millionaire just saying the things we're supposed to believe to keep this whole act up, like how Louis CK throws rocks at "nigger cunt deer" for example. 


I've looked at this before, and I think it's safe to conclude by consuming corporate media you are being used by a rich person or two, unless of course you are that rich person involved in exploiting both sides of the coin, media fatigue and indoctrination. In that sense, our freedom is already being lost. For example, the suppressed reality of global warming and Frank Caliendo's fall from grace into DirecTV commercials could not have happened without a product, oil or media, take your pick, that needed to be sold.


Do we really need to be controlled in this fashion, or at all? Why?

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

If I Don't Get To Murder... I'm Not Free


There's a kind of terrible logic to killing murderers. The idea is they had a choice, now they have to pay for it. But I don't agree with it, and here's why. Only by prosecuting another murderer can you get the the necessary blindness for your real satisfaction to happen over and over again. The people who decry murder do so (deep down) not because it is evil, but because it must feel so good Getting Away With It that it's just unfair that I don't get to get away with it. So now I get to murder you, that makes it fair. Here's the government laying out the real logic: 

Jason January, the former Dallas County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Hearn for capital murder, said to stop the punishment because of fetal alcohol syndrome "would be a free pass for anyone whose parents drank."
This is quite an evil thing to say from my point of view. It follow from this logic it is actually good to murder, because it brings into possibility a more moral murder.