Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
The Full Moon is Coming in 3 Days (1/19) we are in her clutches since Yesterday
A time to "Give up" - "Let Go" as she represents change - and will not be denied - its just that simple! - So maybe I'll see you on "the dark side" - maybe not.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Fauxmance
Update: I have seen the movie - I have lived a more exciting "ending" than the movie - The actor who played David was irritating and weak. I rate it *1/2 (one and one half stars) I think I winked off in the middle of the movie for a few moments. I think that my scenario in the 2nd half below..would have been better - did not like the actor! Popcorn good, movie bad!
________________________________________________________________________
A complex portrait of a contemporary American marriage, "Blue Valentine" tells the story of David and Cindy, a couple who have been together for several years but who are at an impasse in their relationship. While Cindy has blossomed into a woman with opportunities and options, David is still the same person he was when they met, and he is unable to accept either Cindy's growth or his lack of it. Innovatively structured, the narrative unfolds in two distinct time frames, juxtaposing scenes of first love and youthful sexuality with those of disenchantment and discord.
Id say, coming to a theater near you...but why go so far... look out your back door, see your neighbors, friends.... who's driving the Lexus and who's driving che Ford P/Up? If you could follow him around - he's probably having an affair with his secretary and she's with a man 10 years younger than her. They both meetup at home about 7pm during the week wreaking of their last two hours of outside intimacy.
I guess this is a norm in today's society - several children holding their relationship together, $20,000 real estate taxes, 20,000 mortgage payments, 20,000 this and 20,000 thats... Tied and Twisted in a Family lifestyle that is too complicated to unwind. He is taking high blood pressure medicine that is rendering his male status "limp" - she is on two anti-depressants - one to keep the depression away and the other to keep anxiety down. She has begun hormone replacement therapy early to stay sexually lubricated and he has upped his viagra from 50 mg to 100 mg and they both are under 50 years old. The economy may come back - but their youthfulness and lives will not.
Finally, I don't think this movie is about the above, just what is happening in your neighborhood.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Taking care of Business - Charles Schwab - NOT!
Dear Wes:
You suggested I write - If I need something
Paul
Update 1/18 - Schwab gave me 90 trades with a $2 discount - a company that responds to a situation.
You suggested I write - If I need something
I have a 4G Anderoid that has the ability to have Streetsmart Pro. Apparently - Schwab has announced an iPhone application This tells me that someone is getting something before me - a 2nd class customer - I guess I'll ask for a $2 discount on my going forward trades until I get treated equally.
Yes, I know I can still get Schwab on the net. It is not your fault, I know - so please forward this to the idiots who made this decision. I'm not interested in an "I'm sorry" - it is an excuse. This is business - Schwab has, without their consideration, offended the non iphone customers - furthermore, Schwab is very late in offering a smart phone application - I read too! Since Schwab was late with the iPhone application they just could have waited until they served everyone equally. ATT is a 3rd rate provider - iPhone can only be as good as its weakest point... Schwab too!
So, I think a $2 discount on trades is fare for 2nd rate customers and I'll be glad to go back to the regular fee when Schwab treats me equally with all traders.
This is not for you,,, it's a pass-along note - the quicker the better. I hope you and your family had a wonderful holiday season
Paul
Update 1/18 - Schwab gave me 90 trades with a $2 discount - a company that responds to a situation.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Technicals abroad as I go to bed - Pre-market - to react to several factors
TraderJamie - From Ontario, Canada - on $SPY
DrDuru - from Altanta - On T2108 - SSO 2X leveraged $SPY Put options
ADP - Estimated Employment numbers for Friday 1/7/2011 s/b up
Not so optimistic from Dept of Labor anticipation for Friday
$SPY formed Double Top by close of trading Wednesday
T-2108 in the "RED ZONE"
$SPXA50R - poor man's T2108
Extended - over 80 (over bought market)
MACD - shows weakness forward and crossover
Black over red - preparing move towards -0
Setting up hedge beginning today (Wednesday)
SSO 02/19/2011 50.00/25 put options
Full Disclosure:
Hedge covering
150 long term Call options (in the money) (S) Sprint
50 Long term Call options (in the money) )CSCO) cisco systems
(both in positive territory at the Market's close - Wednesday)
PS. as I look at the New Moon (to your right) giving a turbo effect to the markets - is a bullish indicator in the rush toward the Full Moon (where change leads to madness) but... it only has to be right more than 50% of the time - as all other good indicators - There are no sure things!
DrDuru - from Altanta - On T2108 - SSO 2X leveraged $SPY Put options
ADP - Estimated Employment numbers for Friday 1/7/2011 s/b up
Not so optimistic from Dept of Labor anticipation for Friday
$SPY formed Double Top by close of trading Wednesday
T-2108 in the "RED ZONE"
$SPXA50R - poor man's T2108
Extended - over 80 (over bought market)
MACD - shows weakness forward and crossover
Black over red - preparing move towards -0
Setting up hedge beginning today (Wednesday)
SSO 02/19/2011 50.00/25 put options
Full Disclosure:
Hedge covering
150 long term Call options (in the money) (S) Sprint
50 Long term Call options (in the money) )CSCO) cisco systems
(both in positive territory at the Market's close - Wednesday)
PS. as I look at the New Moon (to your right) giving a turbo effect to the markets - is a bullish indicator in the rush toward the Full Moon (where change leads to madness) but... it only has to be right more than 50% of the time - as all other good indicators - There are no sure things!
(double click to read)
At My Signal, Unleash Hell…
Steven Jobs - Will Power - Control
Gave the Music Industry Cancer
Giving the Motion Picture Industry - The Warning of a Master
Made his company Double in Size during this Depression
Can press a simple button - and watch a nation want one.
Beat one of the Deadliest Cancers - So Far.
"Reinvented the Story of Success" - His!
Doesn't smile very Much -
From BanksterUSA - 2011 Bank related Problems on the Horizon
1) The Demise of Bank of America
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the troubledBank of America (BofA). BofA is already under the gun, defending itself from multiple lawsuits demanding that the bank buy back billions worth of toxic mortgages it peddled to investors. The firm is also at the heart of robo-signing scandal, having wrongfully kicked many American families to the curb. If Assange has emails showing that Countrywide or BofA knew they were recklessly abandoning underwriting standards and/or peddling toxic dreck to investors, the damage to the firm could be irreparable.2) Robo-signers Wreaking Havoc
With lawsuits abounding, new types of fraud in the foreclosure process are being uncovered daily, including accounting fraud, fake attorneys, destroyed promissory notes and false notarizations. The crisis not only calls into question the legality of untold foreclosures, it also calls into question the value of trillions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities held by banks, pension funds, federal, state and local governments. The only government report on the topic by the feisty Congressional Oversight Panel for the TARP acknowledges that “it is possible that ‘robo-signing’ may have concealed deeper problems in the mortgage market that could potentially threaten financial stability.”3) MERS Madness
In addition to outright fraud, numerous state Supreme Courts have questioned the legal standing of the Mortgage Electronic Registration or “MERS” system. MERS is listed as the mortgagee for 60% of U.S. mortgages. It is an electronic clearinghouse created by industry to bypass the property registration system developed by our forefathers in precolonial days to ensure that the King could not easily rob the subjects of their land. Wall Street turned to MERS to speed securitizations (and now foreclosures), but its legal standing is now in doubt and its shoddy processing of documents has major ramifications for the securitization process as well. Look for a rotten “MERS fix” in the new Congress. Let’s hope it gives consumer advocates some leverage to demand justice for Americans being robbed by the new Kings on Wall Street.4) Flash Crash Calamity
The “flash crash” of May 2010 rattled the markets and caused a stunning 700 point drop in the Dow within minutes. Regulators think they know what occurred, but they are moving too slowly to put the brakes on hair-trigger trading. Seventy percent of Wall Street trades take place in milliseconds, so it is no surprise that mini-flash crashes are becoming a constant. With traders now gearing up to trade on raw news feeds and Twitter, we can anticipate even more volatility. A small financial transaction tax targeting high-volume, high-speed trades is long overdue. It would throw sand in the roulette wheel and raise much needed revenue for the federal government.5) Bigger Behemoth Banks
The Federal Reserve is planning to “stress test” the big banks again. The same 19 banks that underwent the first stress tests in 2009 will be tested again, but this time the Fed says it won’t release the results. Why not? Banks with toxic mortgages and mortgage-backed securities on their books and concomitant legal exposure to “put back” law suits are being kept afloat by accounting tricks, TARP and Fed loans. Honest stress tests of still weak financial institutions may well result in sales and buyouts that will further consolidate the already concentrated banking industry and create larger and more unwieldy “too big to fail” behemoths — backed by the guarantee of the American taxpayer.6) Foreclosure Tsunami
Housing foreclosures may top nine million in 2011 and Goldman Sachs predicts the number will reach 12 million in the next few years. The result will be another significant drop in home prices in 2011 and even more families underwater. Civilized nations see the forcible migration of a city the size of New York as an economic and humanitarian catastrophe, but not the United States. The Obama administration and Congress have callously refused to take meaningful action to aid families facing foreclosure even in the face of widespread predatory lending and rampant foreclosure fraud. The only hope now for millions of American families is aggressive action by the 50 state Attorneys General who are actively investigating foreclosure fraud. Whether they have the guts to wrestle a settlement out of the big banks that slows the foreclosure machine and offers families meaningful options has yet to be seen.7) Bankrupt Cities and States
Meredith Whitney, a research analyst who correctly predicted the credit crunch, is now warning that over 100 American cities could go bust next year. She anticipates billions worth of municipal bond defaults and warns: “next to housing this is the single most important issue in the U.S. and certainly the biggest threat to the U.S. economy.” States are also in dire straits. The economic shock of mass unemployment on top of years of population decline, deindustrialization and the like have left cities unable to meet their obligations to taxpayers and retirees. With an austerity anschluss underway in the House, it may take a bankruptcy of a major player to prod an appropriate federal response to this looming disaster.8) Gas Prices above $4.00
The price of energy and other commodities shifted into high gear in late August when the Federal Reserve Chairman decided to stimulate the economy with quantitative easing. Speculators quickly began bidding up the value of asset classes like crude oil, metals and food commodities. In December, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission failed to apply position limits to these commodities, delaying rules that would crack down on speculators and aid consumers who are already seeing big price hikes at the pump. Without swift action, skyrocketing gas prices will further tank an already stalled economy.As we hope for the best in 2011, let’s prepare for the worst. The big banks are sure to deliver.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
"Takin' out the Trash" - small note on back pages local newspaper - from "The Dark Side" Today 1/3/2011
DOVER, Del. -- A military expert who served three Republican presidents and helped get the Vietnam Veterans Memorial built as part of his dedication to those who fought in that war was found dead in a landfill, and authorities were trying to piece together when he was last seen alive.
The body of John Wheeler III, 66, was uncovered Friday when a garbage truck emptied its contents at the Cherry Island landfill in Wilmington. The truck had collected the trash from about 10 commercial disposal bins in Newark, several miles from Wheeler's home in the historic district of New Castle, but police said they aren't sure which container his body came from.
Friends say they traded e-mails with Wheeler - who had not been reported missing - around Christmas. Wheeler also had been scheduled to take an Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington on Dec. 28, but it's not clear if he ever made the trip, said investigators, who have labeled Wheeler's death a homicide.
Family members may not have reported him missing because they were out of town, Newark police spokesman Lt. Mark Farrall said.
Efforts by The Associated Press to contact his wife, Katherine Klyce, were unsuccessful, but his family issued a statement through the police department.
"As you must appreciate, this is a tragic time for the family. We are grieving our loss. Please understand that the family has no further comment at this time. We trust that everyone will respect the family's privacy."
Wheeler followed in his decorated father's footsteps and attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. After graduating in 1966, in the midst of the Vietnam War, he served five years in the Army, including as a staff officer at the Pentagon, and retired from the military in 1971.
In later years, Wheeler, as special assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force at the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration, helped develop the Air Force Cyber Command. A citation for his service in 2008 said Wheeler recognized that the military needed to combat the growing vulnerability of U.S. weapon systems to cyber intrusions, according to his biography.
Longtime friend and fellow West Point graduate Richard Radez said that in an e-mail the day after Christmas, Wheeler wrote he believed the nation wasn't sufficiently prepared for cyber warfare.
"This was something that had preoccupied him over the last couple of years," Radez said.
Wheeler's house in New Castle was dark Monday night and no one answered the door. Yellow police evidence tape was stretched across two wooden chairs in the kitchen, where several wooden floorboards were missing. A woman who lives next door to the duplex refused to talk about the case, saying she had been asked not to comment. She did not provide details.
Though the police have searched the home, it was not considered a crime scene, Farrall said.
"We don't have a crime scene at this point," said Farrall.
In New York City, a doorman at the building where Wheeler and Klyce shared a condominium, said he hadn't seen Klyce in two weeks and a package for her had been at the front desk for days. He said two detectives were at the condo in the Harlem section of the city.
New York City police said they couldn't immediately confirm that they were involved in the investigation. Telephone messages left for Klyce at the New Castle home were not immediately returned.
This is not just a little "pimple" on the face of America - there probably is a story here large enough to take over the news, congressional investigations, and a large group of behind the scenes being exposed and prosecuted - this is a " The Deeper it Gets, - this little pimple - the bigger the "Tumor" that is generating it.
Mabye it has to do with Wiki-leaks - Lots of "Dark Men and Women" involved - and how shall america follow this.... Stay tuned!!!!
The body of John Wheeler III, 66, was uncovered Friday when a garbage truck emptied its contents at the Cherry Island landfill in Wilmington. The truck had collected the trash from about 10 commercial disposal bins in Newark, several miles from Wheeler's home in the historic district of New Castle, but police said they aren't sure which container his body came from.
Friends say they traded e-mails with Wheeler - who had not been reported missing - around Christmas. Wheeler also had been scheduled to take an Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington on Dec. 28, but it's not clear if he ever made the trip, said investigators, who have labeled Wheeler's death a homicide.
Family members may not have reported him missing because they were out of town, Newark police spokesman Lt. Mark Farrall said.
Efforts by The Associated Press to contact his wife, Katherine Klyce, were unsuccessful, but his family issued a statement through the police department.
"As you must appreciate, this is a tragic time for the family. We are grieving our loss. Please understand that the family has no further comment at this time. We trust that everyone will respect the family's privacy."
Wheeler followed in his decorated father's footsteps and attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. After graduating in 1966, in the midst of the Vietnam War, he served five years in the Army, including as a staff officer at the Pentagon, and retired from the military in 1971.
In later years, Wheeler, as special assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force at the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration, helped develop the Air Force Cyber Command. A citation for his service in 2008 said Wheeler recognized that the military needed to combat the growing vulnerability of U.S. weapon systems to cyber intrusions, according to his biography.
Longtime friend and fellow West Point graduate Richard Radez said that in an e-mail the day after Christmas, Wheeler wrote he believed the nation wasn't sufficiently prepared for cyber warfare.
"This was something that had preoccupied him over the last couple of years," Radez said.
Wheeler's house in New Castle was dark Monday night and no one answered the door. Yellow police evidence tape was stretched across two wooden chairs in the kitchen, where several wooden floorboards were missing. A woman who lives next door to the duplex refused to talk about the case, saying she had been asked not to comment. She did not provide details.
Though the police have searched the home, it was not considered a crime scene, Farrall said.
"We don't have a crime scene at this point," said Farrall.
In New York City, a doorman at the building where Wheeler and Klyce shared a condominium, said he hadn't seen Klyce in two weeks and a package for her had been at the front desk for days. He said two detectives were at the condo in the Harlem section of the city.
New York City police said they couldn't immediately confirm that they were involved in the investigation. Telephone messages left for Klyce at the New Castle home were not immediately returned.
This is not just a little "pimple" on the face of America - there probably is a story here large enough to take over the news, congressional investigations, and a large group of behind the scenes being exposed and prosecuted - this is a " The Deeper it Gets, - this little pimple - the bigger the "Tumor" that is generating it.
Mabye it has to do with Wiki-leaks - Lots of "Dark Men and Women" involved - and how shall america follow this.... Stay tuned!!!!
Monday, January 3, 2011
Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change
View more presentations from Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.
Maybe it was Barry Goldwater, maybe not, but some of that Era said it
"Lets cut off California and set it out to sea" That was a 60's statement - didn't happen, but California is about 95% Cripple in our current Economy - so maybe "it's done!"
So Now - here is my suggestion - during a full session of Congress - While most of the Lawyers are having a convention in Washington. Let's surgically remove Washington DC and the surrounding communities - and "pull the plug" , Energy, Oxygen and all escape routes out of the area - including selectively blocking the Sun in the intended area, cutting off the water supply - and anything else we can think of....To Create a National Monument Called "Frozen in Time - the 1st Decade of the 21 Century" It will be worth picking up the pieces no matter the burden!
Amen
So Now - here is my suggestion - during a full session of Congress - While most of the Lawyers are having a convention in Washington. Let's surgically remove Washington DC and the surrounding communities - and "pull the plug" , Energy, Oxygen and all escape routes out of the area - including selectively blocking the Sun in the intended area, cutting off the water supply - and anything else we can think of....To Create a National Monument Called "Frozen in Time - the 1st Decade of the 21 Century" It will be worth picking up the pieces no matter the burden!
Amen
We are on an upswing in our Economy - no matter how sloppy and messy it will look - this economy is about to take off - even with the burden of the 10% Class of the Unemployed!
In the meantime, here are five tech trends to look forward to in 2011.
Happy New Year!
1. More tablet computers:
It started last year with the introduction of the Apple iPad. This sleek, touch-screen computer ignited the market for tablets despite its ridiculous name. In a few days, many analysts expect Apple to unveil the iPad 2. If the rampant rumors are to be believed, it will have a front-facing camera and a USB port.
No matter the features, though, I'm betting the iPad 2 will drive up demand for all tablets. Think the iPhone and touch-screen smart phones.
Expect to see more tablets running Google's Android operating system. Last year, we got the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Dell Streak. This year, LG, Archos, Motorola and HTC, among others, are expected to release their own tablets.
2. More typing, less talking:
No doubt, 2010 was the year of the smart phone. Google's Android operating system staked a huge claim on the market, Research in Motion rolled out the BlackBerry Torch and Microsoft introduced its totally revamped Windows Phone 7 operating system.
What does that mean?
It means more people than ever have phones that make it almost as easy to send text messages as it is to make phone calls.
It's not surprising then that the number of minutes that subscribers actually talk on their cell phones has stayed relatively steady during the last three years, but the number of texts they send has tripled, according to the trade group CTIA.
As more people switch from old-school feature phones to increasingly affordable computerlike smart phones, expect this trend to continue.
3. More streaming:
It's only January. I won't go so far as label 2011 "The Year the Disc Died." But I'm really, really tempted to do so.
Last year, after all, was the year of Netflix, Apple TV, Google TV, Hulu, Boxee and Pandora. Americans bypassed the disc, whether CDs or Blu-ray Discs, and looked to the Internet to find other ways of getting the movies, TV shows and music they wanted -- legally.
I don't see this changing in 2011.
If anything, I think this trend will accelerate as cellular companies, namely Verizon and Sprint, ramp up their upgrades to faster, 4G data networks.
To the cloud!
4. More checking in:
This may seem far-fetched to some of you, and I completely understand why.
Currently, according to Pew Research, only about 4 percent of American Web users whip out their smart phones to "check in" with a location-based service, such as Foursquare or Facebook Places. Why, many people ask, would I want to share my location with the online world?
The answer, I think, is coming this year.
Companies and advertisers are finally beginning to realize that only the geekiest of geeks will share their location just because it's cool. The rest of us need a reason, and that reason is free stuff.
The more retailers and restaurants and bars start giving away coupons for checking in, the more people will do it.
Never underestimate what people will do for a deal. Don't believe me? Try going shopping at 4 a.m. on a Black Friday.
5. More home automation:
For a long time, when I thought about home automation, I thought about spending thousands of dollars to install lights and an air conditioner that would come on when I entered a room, or doors that would open when I approached like they do on "Star Trek."There are cheaper ways to go about accomplishing most of that these days. Sure, I could hire a professional installer and still pay thousands of dollars, but why do that when I could install something myself for hundreds of dollars?
Led by companies like Carmel-based Schlage, a division of Ingersoll Rand, there is a growing market for do-it-yourself home automation equipment. Without much effort, you can install webcams, door locks and thermostats that you can control from afar with a smart phone or Web-connected computer.
It's not quite "Star Trek," but with all of the technology coming out in 2011, I think we're getting closer.
Call Star reporter Erika D. Smith at (317) 444-6424, send e-mail to erika.smith@indystar.com or reach on Twitter @indystar_erika.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Remember the first time you tasted Great Fruit, Peanut Butter, Chocolate, Ice Cream, A great Beer, your best Glass of Wine - Very cold water on a very hot day? A first kiss trumped everything: It was the most vivid memory in the minds of those being surveyed.
Sheril Kirshenbaum: Behind the New Year's kiss
Greta Garbo and whoever
A kiss at midnight to ring in the new year. That's what tonight should bring, right?
There is a scientific basis for those high stakes. Whom you kiss can set the course for a good year. Really. It's not magic – it's chemistry and neuroscience. And no matter how painstakingly you set the scene, in the end chemistry trumps mood music. From a scientific perspective, a kiss is a natural litmus test to help us identify a good partner. Start the first moments of 2011 with the right one, and you're beginning the year on a natural high.It's tradition, compulsion, festive duty. An excuse to make a bold move with someone new, a reason to be anxious about finding a date or a chance to celebrate with a longtime love. And there's pressure to get it right.
Just what is it that makes kissing such a powerful and significant part of the human experience?
A kiss influences important chemicals in our brains and bodies responsible for promoting social bonding. According to the work of Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, kissing evolved to facilitate three essential needs: sex drive, romantic love and attachment. Each is involved in promoting reproduction, and kissing bolsters all three. In that view, locking lips helps us find partners, commit to one person and keep couples together long enough to have a child.
Humans use a number of signals – including taste, smell and possibly silent chemical messengers called pheromones – to help us figure out whether someone is a suitable partner and a good person to reproduce with. A kiss means getting close enough to suss out important clues about chemistry and genetics. At this range, our noses can detect valuable information about another person's health and perhaps even DNA.
During a passionate kiss, our blood vessels dilate and our brains receive more oxygen than normal. Our breathing can become irregular and deepen. Our cheeks flush, our pulse quickens and our pupils dilate (which may be one reason so many of us close our eyes). A long, open-mouthed exchange allows our tongues, covered with little bumps called papillae that feature 9,000 to 10,000 taste buds, to gather information about health and fertility.
When we kiss, all five of our senses are transmitting messages to our brain. Billions of nerve connections are firing away and distributing signals around our bodies. Eventually, these signals reach the somatosenory cortex, the region of the brain that processes feelings of touch, temperature, pain and more.
Our brains respond by producing chemicals that help us decide our next move.
A good kiss can work like a drug, influencing the hormones and neurotransmitters coursing through our bodies. Kissing also promotes the "love hormone," oxytocin, which works to maintain a special connection between two people; kissing can keep love alive when a relationship has survived decades, long after novelty has waned.
A bad kiss, alternatively, can lead to chemical chaos. An uncomfortable environment or a poor match can stimulate the "stress hormone" cortisol, discouraging both partners from continuing.
Whether it's magic or a disaster, that first kiss is likely to be unforgettable. Psychologist John Bohannon of Butler University and his research team surveyed 500 people to compare their recollections of a variety of significant life experiences – such as a first kiss and the loss of virginity – to find out what made the most dramatic impression. A first kiss trumped everything: It was the most vivid memory in the minds of those being surveyed.
Bohannon reported that most people could recall up to 90 percent of the details of the moment – where they were, who made the first move – no matter how long ago the exchange took place.
Which is not to say that sharing a New Year's Eve kiss with someone new will necessarily be a memory worth savoring for a lifetime. If midnight's buss is a bust, remember that you can't control everything about the situation and that your body may be saying something very important: Look elsewhere. If the chemistry is wrong, there's not much you can do.
So, a reminder about your life, and what we all are looking for a good thing to think about on January 1st of a new year!
So, a reminder about your life, and what we all are looking for a good thing to think about on January 1st of a new year!
Seriously, do you have the time (more than your attention span of 30 sec.) to read an article that puts a perspective on where "we" are in this pathetic society? Maybe one of the best articles written in a long time.
f you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.
One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?
But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don't even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out.
As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it does makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us -- those elites who run the institutions -- very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.
Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution's members. "Hey, they're a lump. Whaddya expect us to do?"
Doubting readers may consider America's health institutions, the insurance corporations, hospital chains, physicians' lobbies. Between them they have established a perfectly legal right to clip you and me for thousands of dollars at their own discretion. That we so rabidly defend their right to gouge us, given all the information available in the digital age, mystifies the world.
Two hundred years ago one would have thought that the sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would produce informed Americans. Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google.
The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice of cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political. Tom and Ben could never have guessed we would chase prepackaged spectacle, junk science, and titillating rumor such as death panels, Obama as a socialist Muslim and Biblical proof that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. In a nation that equates democracy with everyman's right to an opinion, no matter how ridiculous, this was probably inevitable. After all, dumb people choose dumb stuff. That's why they are called dumb.
But throw in sixty years of television's mind puddling effects, and you end up with 24 million Americans watching Bristol Palin thrashing around on Dancing with the Stars, then watch her being interviewed with all seriousness on the networks as major news. The inescapable conclusion of half of heartland America is that her mama must certainly be presidential material, even if Bristol cannot dance. It ain't a pretty picture out there in Chattanooga and Keokuk.
The other half, the liberal half, concludes that Bristol's bad dancing is part of her spawn-of-the-Devil mama's plan to take over the country, and make millions in the process, not to mention make Tina Fey and Jon Stewart richer than they already are. That's a tall order for a squirrel brained woman who recently asked a black president to "refutiate" the NAACP (though I kinda like refutiate, myself). Cultural stupidity accounts for virtually every aspect of Sarah Palin, both as a person and a political icon. Which, come to think of it, may be a pretty good reason not to "misunderstimate" her. After all, we're still talking about her in both political camps. And the woman OWNS the Huffington Post, fer Chrissake. Not to mention a franchise on cultural ignorance.
Cultural stupidity might not be so bad, were it not self-reproducing and viral, and prone to place stupid people in charge. All of us have, at some point, looked at a boss and asked ourselves how such a numb-nuts could end up in charge of the joint.
In my own field, the book biz, the top hucksters in sales and marketing, car salesman with degrees, are put in charge of publishing the national literature. Similarly, ex-Pentagon generals segue from killing brown babies in Iraq into university presidents and CEOs. Conversely, business leaders such as Donald Rumsfeld who fancy themselves as battlefield commanders and imagine their employees as troops to be "deployed," find themselves happily farting behind Pentagon desks. On the strength of having mistaken Sun Tzu's The Art of War as a business text, they get selected by equally delusional national leaders to make actual war on behalf of the rest of us.
But the most widespread damage is done at more mundane operational levels of the American empire, by clones of the over promoted asshole in the corner office where you work. At least one study demonstrated that random selection for corporate promotions offset the effect significantly. Research again confirms what is common knowledge around every workplace water cooler in the country.
Save my spot in the gulag, I'm off to Wal-Mart
Cultural ignorance of one sort or another is sustained and nurtured in all societies to some degree, because the majority gains material benefit from maintaining it. Americans, for example, reap huge on-the-ground benefits from cultural ignorance -- especially the middle class Babbitry -- from cultural ignorance generated by American hyper-capitalism in the form of junk affluence.
Purposeful ignorance allows us to enjoy cheaper commodities produced through slave labor, both foreign, and increasingly, domestic, and yet "thank god for his bounty" in the nation's churches without a trace of guilt or irony. It allows strong arm theft of weaker nations' resources and goods, to say nothing of the destructiveness of late stage capitalism -- using up and exhausting every planetary resource that sustains human life.
The American defense, on those rare occasions when one is offered, runs roughly, "Well you commie bastard, I ain't never seen a sweatshop and I got no Asian kids chained in the basement. So I've got what the guvment calls plausible deniability. Go fuck yerself!"
Uh, don't look now, but the banksters own your ass, your country has become a work gulag/police state and the most of the world hates you.
Such a thriving American intellectual climate enables capitalist elites to withhold and ration vital resources like health care simply by auctioning it off to the richest. Americans fail to grasp this because the most important fact (that a helluva lot of folks can't afford to bid, and therefore get to die early) never gets equal play with capitalist political propaganda, to wit, that if we give free medical attention to low income cleft palate babies, a wave of Leninism will seize the nation. That is cultural ignorance. We breathe the stuff every day of our lives.
But when Americans too poor to buy health care nevertheless vote to retain the corporate auction process, that is cultural stupidity.
(Let us now pause to clutch our hair in our fists and scream AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!)
Like the old song says, "Them that don't know don't know they don't know." I venture to say that even if they did, they would not know why. Primary truths elude us because of the junk affluence and propaganda. We get buried under a deluge of commodities that suggest we are all rich, or at least richer than most of the world. A mountain range of cheap shoes, cars, iPods, ridiculous amounts of available foodstuffs, and the entire spectacle of engorgement defines, and is enforced as, "quality of life" under materialistic commodities capitalism. The goods we have in our clutches trump the philosophical, or even the most practical considerations. "I may die early eating unidentified beef byproducts soaked in waste chemicals, but I'll die owning a 65-inch HDTV and a new five speed automatic Dodge Durango with a 5.7 L Hemi V8 under the hood!"
Even the threat of toasting planetary life is not enough to shake Americans loose from this disconnect. As Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Guy R. McPherson, points out, "79.6% of respondents to a Scientific American poll are unwilling to forgo even a single penny to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change. Scientific American readers undoubtedly are better informed than the general populace. And yet they won't pay a thing to avoid extinction of our species. Kinda makes you warm and fuzzy all over, doesn't it?"
Let us pray the next generation is a tad sharper.
Taser the tots
The "American Lifestyle," increasingly suspect as it is these days, is heavily soldiered and policed in the name of keeping we self-defined lotus eaters safe and secure from a jealous outside world. Which according to cultural consensus is a world that is, at this very moment, stuffing its under drawers with explosives and buying plane tickets to Moline. Cultural ignorance dictates that the best way to stop foreign terrorists flying into the country is by humiliating American citizens flying out of the country. Go ahead, grope me, X-ray my dick and for god's sake don't let anyone bring a large bottle of shampoo on board. In an obedient, authority-worshipping police state, physical insult and surveillance are proof of safety.
It's profitable too, and not just for scanner manufacturers. The brouhaha over body scanners and crotch groping provide media with titillating fuel for ratings, thereby driving up TV advertising rates, which is passed on in the price of products we buy. So we pay to be insulted, have the hell scared out of us, and to unknowingly have our behavior shaped. Under American style capitalism, this mobius strip of cultural ignorance is called a win-win situation for everybody.
This also conveniently distracts us from the everyday human insult we practice on one another, as a result of state manufactured cultural misinformation -- fear. Ten years of orange alerts and post 9/11 fear mongering have led us to draw some paradoxical cultural conclusions.
Let us briefly careen off into one of these paradoxes; for instance: that we can taser our way to domestic security and tranquility. Yes, it's ugly business, but tasing the citizenry must be done. And besides, in these days of high unemployment, it's a paycheck for somebody -- usually, the guy who sat behind us in grade school happily eating chalk.
With taser packing police officers in thousands of schools, even grade schools (a weird enough cultural statement to begin with -- needless to say, the resulting deaths and injuries of school kids have personal injury lawyers shouting eureka and contemplating new recreational sail craft moored at Martha's Vineyard. Such are the rewards of righteous works through cult-ig.
In any case, the chance at a juicy lawsuit is accepted as a satisfactory offset to any screaming and writing in our school hallways. What are 50,000 volts and a little nerve damage, compared to a shot at paying off the credit cards, upgrading the family ride, and maybe remodeling the kitchen too?
But we gotta stick to the subject of cultural ignorance here, mainly because I wrote the title first and am determined to maintain some illusion of a theme here, or at least bullshit the reader into thinking that I have.
Soooo . . .
It can be safely said that cultural ignorance consists of the rational, sensible questions that never get asked. But it also includes the weird ones that are. For instance, one of the questions asked regarding tasering school kids is: What is the allowable weight range of a child to be tased? (Taser manufacturers say 60 pounds.) Somehow, by this geezer's prehistoric reasoning, that sounds like the wrong question, not to mention one that by its nature leads us away from the cultural truth.
The truth is that we live in a society which sanctions semi-electrocution of its own children on the grounds that it is not fatal, and therefore not true electrocution. It springs from the same streak of cultural cruelty that deems semi-drowning by water boarding not to be torture because it is seldom fatal.
This is not to be uncharitable to American communities willing to pony up tax money for school tasers. They've amply demonstrated their affectionate commitment to their children by bringing creationism and pizza-for-breakfast into the schools. But there remains the question, "What kind of community comes up with the idea of tasering its own children?"
The information racketeers
It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That's why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet proof mammalian material.
Our hyper capitalist system, through command of our research, media and political institutions, expands upon and disseminates only that information which generates money and transactions. It avoids, neglects or spins the hell out of information that does not. And if none of those work, the info is exiled to some corner of cyberspace such as Daily Kos, where it cannot change the status quo, yet can be ballyhooed as proof of our national freedom of expression. Here come the rotten eggs from the Internet liberals.
Cyberspace by nature feels very big from the inside, and its affinity groups, seeing themselves in aggregate and in mutual self reference, imagine their role bigger and more effective than it is. From within the highly directed, technologically administrated, marketed-to and propagandized rat cage called America, this is all but impossible to comprehend. Especially when corporate owned media tells us it is.
Take the recent world-shaking WikiLeak's "revelations" of Washington's petty misery and drivel, which are scarcely revelations, just more extensive details about what we all already knew. Come on now, is it a revelation that Karzai and his entire government is a nest of fraudulent double-crossing thieves? Or that the US is duplicitous? Or that Angela Merkel is dull? The main revelation in the WikiLeaks affair was the U.S. government's response -- which was to bring US freedom of speech policy firmly in line with China's. Millions of us in cyber-ghettos saw it coming, but our alarm warnings were shouted inside a cyberspace vacuum bell jar.
Bear in mind that I am writing this from outside the US borders and media environment, where people watch the WikiLeaks story unfold more in amusement than anything else.
The WikiLeaks affair is surely seismic to those whose asses ride on the elite diplomatic intrigues. But in the big picture it will not change the way the top lizards in global politics, money and war have done business since the feudal age -- which is to say with arrogant disregard for the rest of us. Theirs is an ancient system of human dominance that only shifts names and methodologies over the centuries. Two years from now, little will have changed in the old, old story of the powerful few over the powerless many. In this overarching drama, Obama, Hillary and Julian Assange are passing players. Watching the sweaty, fetid machinations of our overlords with such passionate involvement only keeps us from seeing the big picture -- that they are the players and we are the pawns.
Still, I for one am in favor of giving Assange the Médaille militaire, the Nobel Prize, 15 virgins in paradise and a billion in cash as a reward for his courage in doing damned well the only significant thing that can be done at this time -- momentarily fucking up government control of information. But "potentially stimulating a new age of U.S. government transparency," (BBC) it ain't."
Which brings us to back to the question of cultural ignorance. For ten points, why was Julian Assange forced to do what the world press was supposed to be doing in the first place?
Bulletin: PayPal has caved to government pressure to pull WikiLeak's PayPal account for contributions. However, the feds generously let PayPal keep its porn and prostitution clients.
The transparency scam
It is a form of cultural ignorance to believe that at some point or other, we were more in charge and that our government was somehow more transparent in the past. Societies declining into obsolescence understandably resist looking forward, and hang onto their past mythologies. Consequently, both liberals and conservatives in America feed on myths of political action which died in Vietnam. The results are ludicrous. Tea Partiers attempt to emulate the 1960s protest gatherings by staging rallies sponsored by the richest beneficiaries of the status quo. For the average TP participant, the goal, near as I can tell, is to "start a new American Revolution," by wearing foodstuffs, screaming, threatening, and voting for nitwits. Media pundits proclaim the Tea Party "a historic populist movement."
Neither populist, nor an authentic movement, the Tea Party may yet prove historic, however, by seriously fucking things up more than they already are. Spun entirely from manufactured spectacle (and thus void of cohesive political philosophy or internal logic), the Tea Party lurches across the political landscape bellowing at the cameras and collecting the victims of cultural ignorance in sort of a medieval idiots crusade. But to the American public, seeing the Tea Party on television is proof enough of relevancy and significance. After all, stuff doesn't get on TV unless it's important.
Progressives also fancy a revolution, one in which they participate through the Internet petitions, and media events such as the risk free Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity, where no one risked even missing an episode of Tremaine. Seeing people like themselves on television was proof fighting the good fight. The Stewart rally was nonetheless culturally historic; we will never see a larger public display of post modern irony congratulating itself.
In the historical view, cultural ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge. It is also the result of long term cultural and political struggle. Since the industrial revolution, the struggle has been between capital and workers. Capital won in America and spread its successful tactics worldwide. Now we watch global capitalism wreck the world and attempt to stay ahead of that wreckage clutching its profits. A subservient world kneels before it, praying that planet destroying jobs will fall their way. Will unrestrained global capitalism, with all the power and momentum on its side and motivated purely by machine-like harvesting of profits, reduce the faceless masses in its path to slavery? Does a duck shit in a pond?
Meanwhile, here we are, American riders on the short bus, barreling into the Grand Canyon. With typical American gunpoint optimism, we've convinced ourselves we're in an airplane. A few smarter kids in the back whisper about hijacking and turning the bus around. But the security cop riding shotgun just strokes his taser and smiles. Not that yours truly has the ass to take on the security surveillance state. Hell no. I jumped out the window when the bus shot past Mexico.
What America needs is some balls
GOP honcho Mitch O'Connell says what America needs is for Republicans to finish beating the snot out of Obama, and strengthen the already rich by eliminating taxes for them and shifting the burden onto us. Obama says America needs to find bipartisan cooperation with the party of ruthlessness. Elton John says that America needs more compassion (Thanks, we never noticed).
What America really needs is a wall-to-wall people's insurrection, preferably based on force and fear of force, the only thing oligarchs understand. And even then the odds are not good. The oligarchs have all the legal power, police, jails and prisons, surveillance and firepower. Not to mention a docile populace.
Shy of open insurrection, a nationwide refusal to pay income taxes would certainly shake things up. But broader America is happy in the sense they know happiness as an undisturbed regimen of toil, stress and commodity consumption. Despite the way it looks in the news, most Americans remain untouched by foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment. So risking loss of their work-buy-sleep cycle in an insurrection looks to be sheer lunacy to them. Like cows, they are kept comfortable in the pure animal sense to be milked for profit. Animal comfort kills all thoughts of revolution. Hell, half of mankind would be thrilled with the average American's present material situation.
And besides, revolutionary history does not exist for Americans. The 20th Century's successful revolutions in Russia, Germany, Mexico, China, and Cuba are wired into our minds as history's evil failures, because all but one were Marxist. (The only successful non-Marxist revolution of the 20th Century was Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution).
So if we are talking change through revolt, we're necessarily talking about deconditioning because the thing we fear already has a life deep in our own consciousness. Deconditioning from cultural ignorance is at the heart of any insurrectionary politics.
Deconditioning also involves risk and suffering. But it is transformative, freeing the self from helplessness and fear. It unleashes the fifth freedom, the right to an autonomous consciousness. That makes deconditioning about as individual and personal act as is possible. Maybe the only genuine individual act.
Once unencumbered by self-induced and manufactured cultural ignorance, it becomes clear that politics worldwide is entirely about money, power and national mythology, with or without some degree of human rights. America still has all of the above to one degree or another. Yet for all practical purposes, such as advancing the freedom and the well being of its own people, the American republic has collapsed.
Of course, there is still money to be made by the already rich. So the million or so people who own the country and the government use their control to convince us that there is no collapse, just economic and political problems that need to be solved. Naturally, they are willing to do that for us. Consequently, the economy is discussed in political terms, because the government is the only body with the power to legislate, and therefore render the will of the owning class into law.
But politics and money are never going to fill what is essentially a public vacuum that is moral, philosophical and spiritual. (The latter was instantly recognized by fundamentalist Christians, disfigured by cultural ignorance, as they may be.) Not many ordinary Americans talk about this vacuum. The required spiritual and philosophical language has been successfully purged by newspeak, popular culture, a human regimentation process masquerading as a national educational system, and the ruthlessness of everyday competition, which leaves no time to contemplate anything.
Still, the void, the meaninglessness of ordinary work and the emptiness of daily life scares thinking citizens shitless, with its many unspeakables, spy cams, security state pronouncements, citizens being economically disappeared, and general back-of-the-mind unease. Capitalism's faceless machinery has colonized our very souls. If the political was not personal to begin with, it's personal now.
Some Americans believe we can collectively triumph over the monolith we presently fear and worship. Others believe the best we can do is to find the personal strength to endure and go forward on lonely inner plains of the self.
Doing either will take inner moral, spiritual and intellectual liberation. It all depends on where you choose to fight your battle. Or if you even choose to fight it. But one thing is certain: The only way out is in.
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/219601-AMERICA-Y-UR-PEEPS-B-SO-DUM-Ignorance-and-courage-in-the-age-of-Lady-Gaga
One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?
But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don't even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out.
As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it does makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us -- those elites who run the institutions -- very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.
Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution's members. "Hey, they're a lump. Whaddya expect us to do?"
Doubting readers may consider America's health institutions, the insurance corporations, hospital chains, physicians' lobbies. Between them they have established a perfectly legal right to clip you and me for thousands of dollars at their own discretion. That we so rabidly defend their right to gouge us, given all the information available in the digital age, mystifies the world.
Two hundred years ago one would have thought that the sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would produce informed Americans. Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google.
The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice of cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political. Tom and Ben could never have guessed we would chase prepackaged spectacle, junk science, and titillating rumor such as death panels, Obama as a socialist Muslim and Biblical proof that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. In a nation that equates democracy with everyman's right to an opinion, no matter how ridiculous, this was probably inevitable. After all, dumb people choose dumb stuff. That's why they are called dumb.
But throw in sixty years of television's mind puddling effects, and you end up with 24 million Americans watching Bristol Palin thrashing around on Dancing with the Stars, then watch her being interviewed with all seriousness on the networks as major news. The inescapable conclusion of half of heartland America is that her mama must certainly be presidential material, even if Bristol cannot dance. It ain't a pretty picture out there in Chattanooga and Keokuk.
The other half, the liberal half, concludes that Bristol's bad dancing is part of her spawn-of-the-Devil mama's plan to take over the country, and make millions in the process, not to mention make Tina Fey and Jon Stewart richer than they already are. That's a tall order for a squirrel brained woman who recently asked a black president to "refutiate" the NAACP (though I kinda like refutiate, myself). Cultural stupidity accounts for virtually every aspect of Sarah Palin, both as a person and a political icon. Which, come to think of it, may be a pretty good reason not to "misunderstimate" her. After all, we're still talking about her in both political camps. And the woman OWNS the Huffington Post, fer Chrissake. Not to mention a franchise on cultural ignorance.
Cultural stupidity might not be so bad, were it not self-reproducing and viral, and prone to place stupid people in charge. All of us have, at some point, looked at a boss and asked ourselves how such a numb-nuts could end up in charge of the joint.
In my own field, the book biz, the top hucksters in sales and marketing, car salesman with degrees, are put in charge of publishing the national literature. Similarly, ex-Pentagon generals segue from killing brown babies in Iraq into university presidents and CEOs. Conversely, business leaders such as Donald Rumsfeld who fancy themselves as battlefield commanders and imagine their employees as troops to be "deployed," find themselves happily farting behind Pentagon desks. On the strength of having mistaken Sun Tzu's The Art of War as a business text, they get selected by equally delusional national leaders to make actual war on behalf of the rest of us.
But the most widespread damage is done at more mundane operational levels of the American empire, by clones of the over promoted asshole in the corner office where you work. At least one study demonstrated that random selection for corporate promotions offset the effect significantly. Research again confirms what is common knowledge around every workplace water cooler in the country.
Save my spot in the gulag, I'm off to Wal-Mart
Cultural ignorance of one sort or another is sustained and nurtured in all societies to some degree, because the majority gains material benefit from maintaining it. Americans, for example, reap huge on-the-ground benefits from cultural ignorance -- especially the middle class Babbitry -- from cultural ignorance generated by American hyper-capitalism in the form of junk affluence.
Purposeful ignorance allows us to enjoy cheaper commodities produced through slave labor, both foreign, and increasingly, domestic, and yet "thank god for his bounty" in the nation's churches without a trace of guilt or irony. It allows strong arm theft of weaker nations' resources and goods, to say nothing of the destructiveness of late stage capitalism -- using up and exhausting every planetary resource that sustains human life.
The American defense, on those rare occasions when one is offered, runs roughly, "Well you commie bastard, I ain't never seen a sweatshop and I got no Asian kids chained in the basement. So I've got what the guvment calls plausible deniability. Go fuck yerself!"
Uh, don't look now, but the banksters own your ass, your country has become a work gulag/police state and the most of the world hates you.
Such a thriving American intellectual climate enables capitalist elites to withhold and ration vital resources like health care simply by auctioning it off to the richest. Americans fail to grasp this because the most important fact (that a helluva lot of folks can't afford to bid, and therefore get to die early) never gets equal play with capitalist political propaganda, to wit, that if we give free medical attention to low income cleft palate babies, a wave of Leninism will seize the nation. That is cultural ignorance. We breathe the stuff every day of our lives.
But when Americans too poor to buy health care nevertheless vote to retain the corporate auction process, that is cultural stupidity.
(Let us now pause to clutch our hair in our fists and scream AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!)
Like the old song says, "Them that don't know don't know they don't know." I venture to say that even if they did, they would not know why. Primary truths elude us because of the junk affluence and propaganda. We get buried under a deluge of commodities that suggest we are all rich, or at least richer than most of the world. A mountain range of cheap shoes, cars, iPods, ridiculous amounts of available foodstuffs, and the entire spectacle of engorgement defines, and is enforced as, "quality of life" under materialistic commodities capitalism. The goods we have in our clutches trump the philosophical, or even the most practical considerations. "I may die early eating unidentified beef byproducts soaked in waste chemicals, but I'll die owning a 65-inch HDTV and a new five speed automatic Dodge Durango with a 5.7 L Hemi V8 under the hood!"
Even the threat of toasting planetary life is not enough to shake Americans loose from this disconnect. As Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Guy R. McPherson, points out, "79.6% of respondents to a Scientific American poll are unwilling to forgo even a single penny to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change. Scientific American readers undoubtedly are better informed than the general populace. And yet they won't pay a thing to avoid extinction of our species. Kinda makes you warm and fuzzy all over, doesn't it?"
Let us pray the next generation is a tad sharper.
Taser the tots
The "American Lifestyle," increasingly suspect as it is these days, is heavily soldiered and policed in the name of keeping we self-defined lotus eaters safe and secure from a jealous outside world. Which according to cultural consensus is a world that is, at this very moment, stuffing its under drawers with explosives and buying plane tickets to Moline. Cultural ignorance dictates that the best way to stop foreign terrorists flying into the country is by humiliating American citizens flying out of the country. Go ahead, grope me, X-ray my dick and for god's sake don't let anyone bring a large bottle of shampoo on board. In an obedient, authority-worshipping police state, physical insult and surveillance are proof of safety.
It's profitable too, and not just for scanner manufacturers. The brouhaha over body scanners and crotch groping provide media with titillating fuel for ratings, thereby driving up TV advertising rates, which is passed on in the price of products we buy. So we pay to be insulted, have the hell scared out of us, and to unknowingly have our behavior shaped. Under American style capitalism, this mobius strip of cultural ignorance is called a win-win situation for everybody.
This also conveniently distracts us from the everyday human insult we practice on one another, as a result of state manufactured cultural misinformation -- fear. Ten years of orange alerts and post 9/11 fear mongering have led us to draw some paradoxical cultural conclusions.
Let us briefly careen off into one of these paradoxes; for instance: that we can taser our way to domestic security and tranquility. Yes, it's ugly business, but tasing the citizenry must be done. And besides, in these days of high unemployment, it's a paycheck for somebody -- usually, the guy who sat behind us in grade school happily eating chalk.
With taser packing police officers in thousands of schools, even grade schools (a weird enough cultural statement to begin with -- needless to say, the resulting deaths and injuries of school kids have personal injury lawyers shouting eureka and contemplating new recreational sail craft moored at Martha's Vineyard. Such are the rewards of righteous works through cult-ig.
In any case, the chance at a juicy lawsuit is accepted as a satisfactory offset to any screaming and writing in our school hallways. What are 50,000 volts and a little nerve damage, compared to a shot at paying off the credit cards, upgrading the family ride, and maybe remodeling the kitchen too?
But we gotta stick to the subject of cultural ignorance here, mainly because I wrote the title first and am determined to maintain some illusion of a theme here, or at least bullshit the reader into thinking that I have.
Soooo . . .
It can be safely said that cultural ignorance consists of the rational, sensible questions that never get asked. But it also includes the weird ones that are. For instance, one of the questions asked regarding tasering school kids is: What is the allowable weight range of a child to be tased? (Taser manufacturers say 60 pounds.) Somehow, by this geezer's prehistoric reasoning, that sounds like the wrong question, not to mention one that by its nature leads us away from the cultural truth.
The truth is that we live in a society which sanctions semi-electrocution of its own children on the grounds that it is not fatal, and therefore not true electrocution. It springs from the same streak of cultural cruelty that deems semi-drowning by water boarding not to be torture because it is seldom fatal.
This is not to be uncharitable to American communities willing to pony up tax money for school tasers. They've amply demonstrated their affectionate commitment to their children by bringing creationism and pizza-for-breakfast into the schools. But there remains the question, "What kind of community comes up with the idea of tasering its own children?"
The information racketeers
It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That's why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet proof mammalian material.
Our hyper capitalist system, through command of our research, media and political institutions, expands upon and disseminates only that information which generates money and transactions. It avoids, neglects or spins the hell out of information that does not. And if none of those work, the info is exiled to some corner of cyberspace such as Daily Kos, where it cannot change the status quo, yet can be ballyhooed as proof of our national freedom of expression. Here come the rotten eggs from the Internet liberals.
Cyberspace by nature feels very big from the inside, and its affinity groups, seeing themselves in aggregate and in mutual self reference, imagine their role bigger and more effective than it is. From within the highly directed, technologically administrated, marketed-to and propagandized rat cage called America, this is all but impossible to comprehend. Especially when corporate owned media tells us it is.
Take the recent world-shaking WikiLeak's "revelations" of Washington's petty misery and drivel, which are scarcely revelations, just more extensive details about what we all already knew. Come on now, is it a revelation that Karzai and his entire government is a nest of fraudulent double-crossing thieves? Or that the US is duplicitous? Or that Angela Merkel is dull? The main revelation in the WikiLeaks affair was the U.S. government's response -- which was to bring US freedom of speech policy firmly in line with China's. Millions of us in cyber-ghettos saw it coming, but our alarm warnings were shouted inside a cyberspace vacuum bell jar.
Bear in mind that I am writing this from outside the US borders and media environment, where people watch the WikiLeaks story unfold more in amusement than anything else.
The WikiLeaks affair is surely seismic to those whose asses ride on the elite diplomatic intrigues. But in the big picture it will not change the way the top lizards in global politics, money and war have done business since the feudal age -- which is to say with arrogant disregard for the rest of us. Theirs is an ancient system of human dominance that only shifts names and methodologies over the centuries. Two years from now, little will have changed in the old, old story of the powerful few over the powerless many. In this overarching drama, Obama, Hillary and Julian Assange are passing players. Watching the sweaty, fetid machinations of our overlords with such passionate involvement only keeps us from seeing the big picture -- that they are the players and we are the pawns.
Still, I for one am in favor of giving Assange the Médaille militaire, the Nobel Prize, 15 virgins in paradise and a billion in cash as a reward for his courage in doing damned well the only significant thing that can be done at this time -- momentarily fucking up government control of information. But "potentially stimulating a new age of U.S. government transparency," (BBC) it ain't."
Which brings us to back to the question of cultural ignorance. For ten points, why was Julian Assange forced to do what the world press was supposed to be doing in the first place?
Bulletin: PayPal has caved to government pressure to pull WikiLeak's PayPal account for contributions. However, the feds generously let PayPal keep its porn and prostitution clients.
The transparency scam
It is a form of cultural ignorance to believe that at some point or other, we were more in charge and that our government was somehow more transparent in the past. Societies declining into obsolescence understandably resist looking forward, and hang onto their past mythologies. Consequently, both liberals and conservatives in America feed on myths of political action which died in Vietnam. The results are ludicrous. Tea Partiers attempt to emulate the 1960s protest gatherings by staging rallies sponsored by the richest beneficiaries of the status quo. For the average TP participant, the goal, near as I can tell, is to "start a new American Revolution," by wearing foodstuffs, screaming, threatening, and voting for nitwits. Media pundits proclaim the Tea Party "a historic populist movement."
Neither populist, nor an authentic movement, the Tea Party may yet prove historic, however, by seriously fucking things up more than they already are. Spun entirely from manufactured spectacle (and thus void of cohesive political philosophy or internal logic), the Tea Party lurches across the political landscape bellowing at the cameras and collecting the victims of cultural ignorance in sort of a medieval idiots crusade. But to the American public, seeing the Tea Party on television is proof enough of relevancy and significance. After all, stuff doesn't get on TV unless it's important.
Progressives also fancy a revolution, one in which they participate through the Internet petitions, and media events such as the risk free Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity, where no one risked even missing an episode of Tremaine. Seeing people like themselves on television was proof fighting the good fight. The Stewart rally was nonetheless culturally historic; we will never see a larger public display of post modern irony congratulating itself.
In the historical view, cultural ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge. It is also the result of long term cultural and political struggle. Since the industrial revolution, the struggle has been between capital and workers. Capital won in America and spread its successful tactics worldwide. Now we watch global capitalism wreck the world and attempt to stay ahead of that wreckage clutching its profits. A subservient world kneels before it, praying that planet destroying jobs will fall their way. Will unrestrained global capitalism, with all the power and momentum on its side and motivated purely by machine-like harvesting of profits, reduce the faceless masses in its path to slavery? Does a duck shit in a pond?
Meanwhile, here we are, American riders on the short bus, barreling into the Grand Canyon. With typical American gunpoint optimism, we've convinced ourselves we're in an airplane. A few smarter kids in the back whisper about hijacking and turning the bus around. But the security cop riding shotgun just strokes his taser and smiles. Not that yours truly has the ass to take on the security surveillance state. Hell no. I jumped out the window when the bus shot past Mexico.
What America needs is some balls
GOP honcho Mitch O'Connell says what America needs is for Republicans to finish beating the snot out of Obama, and strengthen the already rich by eliminating taxes for them and shifting the burden onto us. Obama says America needs to find bipartisan cooperation with the party of ruthlessness. Elton John says that America needs more compassion (Thanks, we never noticed).
What America really needs is a wall-to-wall people's insurrection, preferably based on force and fear of force, the only thing oligarchs understand. And even then the odds are not good. The oligarchs have all the legal power, police, jails and prisons, surveillance and firepower. Not to mention a docile populace.
Shy of open insurrection, a nationwide refusal to pay income taxes would certainly shake things up. But broader America is happy in the sense they know happiness as an undisturbed regimen of toil, stress and commodity consumption. Despite the way it looks in the news, most Americans remain untouched by foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment. So risking loss of their work-buy-sleep cycle in an insurrection looks to be sheer lunacy to them. Like cows, they are kept comfortable in the pure animal sense to be milked for profit. Animal comfort kills all thoughts of revolution. Hell, half of mankind would be thrilled with the average American's present material situation.
And besides, revolutionary history does not exist for Americans. The 20th Century's successful revolutions in Russia, Germany, Mexico, China, and Cuba are wired into our minds as history's evil failures, because all but one were Marxist. (The only successful non-Marxist revolution of the 20th Century was Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution).
So if we are talking change through revolt, we're necessarily talking about deconditioning because the thing we fear already has a life deep in our own consciousness. Deconditioning from cultural ignorance is at the heart of any insurrectionary politics.
Deconditioning also involves risk and suffering. But it is transformative, freeing the self from helplessness and fear. It unleashes the fifth freedom, the right to an autonomous consciousness. That makes deconditioning about as individual and personal act as is possible. Maybe the only genuine individual act.
Once unencumbered by self-induced and manufactured cultural ignorance, it becomes clear that politics worldwide is entirely about money, power and national mythology, with or without some degree of human rights. America still has all of the above to one degree or another. Yet for all practical purposes, such as advancing the freedom and the well being of its own people, the American republic has collapsed.
Of course, there is still money to be made by the already rich. So the million or so people who own the country and the government use their control to convince us that there is no collapse, just economic and political problems that need to be solved. Naturally, they are willing to do that for us. Consequently, the economy is discussed in political terms, because the government is the only body with the power to legislate, and therefore render the will of the owning class into law.
But politics and money are never going to fill what is essentially a public vacuum that is moral, philosophical and spiritual. (The latter was instantly recognized by fundamentalist Christians, disfigured by cultural ignorance, as they may be.) Not many ordinary Americans talk about this vacuum. The required spiritual and philosophical language has been successfully purged by newspeak, popular culture, a human regimentation process masquerading as a national educational system, and the ruthlessness of everyday competition, which leaves no time to contemplate anything.
Still, the void, the meaninglessness of ordinary work and the emptiness of daily life scares thinking citizens shitless, with its many unspeakables, spy cams, security state pronouncements, citizens being economically disappeared, and general back-of-the-mind unease. Capitalism's faceless machinery has colonized our very souls. If the political was not personal to begin with, it's personal now.
Some Americans believe we can collectively triumph over the monolith we presently fear and worship. Others believe the best we can do is to find the personal strength to endure and go forward on lonely inner plains of the self.
Doing either will take inner moral, spiritual and intellectual liberation. It all depends on where you choose to fight your battle. Or if you even choose to fight it. But one thing is certain: The only way out is in.
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/219601-AMERICA-Y-UR-PEEPS-B-SO-DUM-Ignorance-and-courage-in-the-age-of-Lady-Gaga
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)