University president salaries skyrocket despite spiraling student debt

There are three major parasites on the US economy: The military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, and the higher education racket.

The teatard medicine doesn't work

It doesn't work in Wisconsin, and it doesn't work in Kansas. But I'm sure that's exactly what the plutocrats want. After all, their ultimate goal is for the vast teeming majority of the population to be their serfs in the now-unfolding age of scarcity and decline. Welcome to the elder George Bush's glorious new world order studded with a thousand points of light!

Obama gives net neutrality the finger

Imagine my shock!

Actually, what amazes me is the willful refusal of the Democratic Party Kool-Aid drinkers to realize that the Republicans would not have been able to get as far as they have without the Democrats either passively or actively enabling them nearly every step of the way over the past thirty years. But then again, it's not unusual for those who are locked up in a cult mindset to double down when confronted with evidence that their view of the world is missing the mark.

And this is for Monster from the Id in case he never finds his old record:

When it comes to setting policy, the views of the rich seem to count for more

As if those of us who aren't drinking one flavor of Kool-Aid or another haven't figured this out already, an article in The Economist sagely informs us why it's not a good idea to base your sense of purpose in life on being able to influence the decisions made in the centers of power. And that is because, if you're not rich, you won't be able to do so. At least if you live in America.

This is not to say that the Democrats are exactly the same as the Republicans. Of course they're not. The problem lies in the fact that the Democrats are an entirely inadequate opposition party to the Republicans, and this is largely by design. Of course, if beating your head against a brick wall and gunpoint-optimism are your cup of Earl Grey, then hey, whatever gets you through the night! Just don't expect the rest of us to be enthusiastic about such an utterly grim prospect.

And as long as I'm at my keyboard typing a post, here's some Doomer-gruel for you: An article from the Irish Examiner that describes annual honeybee die-offs in the USA as "economically unsustainable". And of course, the neonicotinoid pesticide makers are denying their increasingly obvious role in this catastrophe. But it's okay. I'm sure the Democrats will save us. After all, it's not as if the Democrats are beholden to any corporate interests whose policies and practices are bringing the demise of civilization as we know it ever closer! :-D

It's hard to believe that a Gloomy Gus such as myself came of age during the "can-do" nineteen-eighties. Or maybe that's exactly why I'm so predisposed.



Yes, I like embedding YouTube videos for the fuck of it. What about it?

About ready to throw in the towel

Being born and raised in Wisconsin, I had that Midwestern civic-mindedness drilled into me from a pretty early age. But now our sad, sorry political system has brought me to the point where I am ready to throw in the towel and become a permanent non-voter.

When I first learned about Peak Oil and Gas more than a decade ago, I held out hope that the Democratic Party could be vehicle for mitigating the worst vicissitudes of the coming decline and eventual collapse of industrial civilization. Looking back, that seems terribly naive, but sometimes one must try to work with what one has. After Prez Obama-sama turned out to be about anything but "hope and change", I had pretty much arrived at that point by 2010, so I sat out that election. Then came Scott Walker and his campaign to strip the state-worker unions of most of their collective bargaining ability. It was truly shocking to see how fiercely proud the right had become of being so completely full of ignorance and hate. The resulting demonstrations in Madison in early 2011 breathed new life into my support for the Democratic Party. But the party squandered all that energy and enthusiasm that came its way by putting up the guy who lost the original election in the recall race against Walker. Don't get me wrong. Barrett is a good man and he was a way better choice than that popinjay Kathleen Falk, and I would have liked to have seen him win. But by the start of February of 2012, I had a feeling that he wouldn't, and that feeling was correct. But I knew my home state, and I was pretty sure that old-fashioned, straight-laced Wisconsin didn't want to recall an official who wasn't guilty of any high crimes or misdemeanors that had been substantively proven.

In the time that has passed between election 2010 and now, I really have to say that the co-dependent hanging on and self-delusion of the Democratic Party Kool-Aid drinkers has been bringing me steadily closer rather than further away from throwing in the towel for good. Now I'm at the point where I mostly detest Scott Walker for getting people so riled up that I decided to go back to the fountain a few more times for more helpings of that Kool-Aid. If holding on to false hope (which is a sign of courage and integrity exactly how?) is what gets them through the night, then fine, since whatever is likely to happen will happen regardless of what anybody does. But straw-man-ing the holy crap out of realists who call see things as they see them on their own blogs, is truly the behavior of desperate people who see their carefully-constructed fantasy-world crumbling all around them and consequently have to lash out at those who tell them "This is what I said would happen." It's really quite pathetic and does nothing to make me want to take up the Kool-Aid pitcher yet again.

I remember how eloquent these Democratic bloggers were in heaping well-deserved scorn upon the Bush Administration for its war and civic crimes. But I also remember that when the Obama Administration perpetuated and extended those errors, we camp followers who questioned this found ourselves excoriated as if we were those same war criminals and accused of somehow being in league with them by whom we were forced to realize were mere shills and co-dependent Kool-Aid drinkers. It appeared that ideals were only useful to some people when they served partisan goals. And couching it all in American gunpoint-optimism certainly didn't make it anything other than cynical tribalism. But such is what comes of what Archdruid John Michael Greer calls "knowing only one story", or believing in a single mythic narrative that supposedly explains everything about the world, particularly when this single story prominently involves one kind of demonology or another.

And so in 2014 with Governor Walker up for re-election, our complacent, craven, ignorant, and politically incompetent Wisconsin Democratic Party is putting up a political hack named Mary Burke up against Walker. She is an establishment Democrat not well-suited to win against Walker, and this is the choice the chief politicos of the Wisconsin Democratic Party is imposing on their voters, forget about any primary. Her political experience consists solely of being an appointee of Governor Doyle's administration who was in the post for a very short time, and this position was clearly a reward for a big campaign donation. (This is a standard practice in state-level politics.) Oh yeah, I guess she also had a seat on the Madison school-board that she essentially bought. Don't get me wrong, I made a decision three years ago that I was going to be "in for a penny, in for a pound" against Scott Walker, so I will vote in one more election. But if Mary Burke loses, that will be it for me because I have had it with playing Charlie Brown to the Democratic Party's Lucy with the football.



Another beef I have with the Democratic Party is Obamacare. While the roll-out is less of a clusterfuck than it was six months ago, it's not really making health insurance affordable for working-class people. The only thing Obamacare is going to mean for a lot of working people is a four-hundred dollar hit on their 2014 taxes that will make their situation worse, not better. Of course, since I am voting in the upcoming election regardless, Obamacare will have a total of almost three years to prove me wrong. But somehow, I don't think it will, because these days, I usually end up being right about these things. And the righter you are, the more shit you get for it.

And if the Democrats are doing such a bang-up job in nominating hacks such as Mary Burke and with Obamacare, then why are millenials planning on mostly staying away from the polls this November, huh? Keep in mind that the twenty-somethings was the only group that Barrett won in the recall election that he lost, so this is the group upon which Democratic victories largely depend now. But for some reason, they are not impressed with what they see. I would remind the reader of economist Thomas Pikkety's exhaustive academic study that reveals that the average person has almost no say, short of shouting into the wind (as I am doing with this very blog), in what is ultimately decided in the centers of power in the USA.

Those disillusioned millenials are certainly aware of that without any help from Mr. Pikkety. But rather than allow myself to be trapped in a false dichotomy of false hope or despair, I would submit that there is a third option. This option is calm acceptance of the way things are and what is likely to happen, and the cultivation of spiritual growth in change in the face of a society that has almost entirely forgotten what those things even are. If I can do it, anybody can do it. :-)

The Black Friday melee

There have been reports of inappropriate behavior at stores and shopping centers on Black Friday in the past, but this is the first time there has been a nationwide wave of consumer-driven violence on the day after Thanksgiving reminiscent of the Festival from the old "Star Trek" episode "The Return Of The Archons". And if you think I'm exaggerating, keep in mind that there have been reports of shootings and stabbings attending this madness.

Now, everybody who isn't being an ostrich with their head in the sand (and in the USA, that isn't very many folks at all, really) knows that we're heading toward a collapse of some kind. Exactly what form it will take and when it will happen is not for me to say. But some kind of mass-reversal of American society's fortunes is on the horizon from environmental degradation, resource depletion, and financial over-exploitation. The form and severity of any such event will always and inevitably be shaped by the moral condition of the society in question. This Black Friday 2013 ugliness has really driven home for me that there is no hope whatsoever for our society. If anything good emerges on the other side of collapse, it will be because what's left of society in the aftermath will renounce everything that we are as of this writing as a consequence. But before that? The big meltdown will be massively ugly. Thinking about that made it hard for me to remain asleep last night.

The new pope seems to be in agreement with me, as he recently penned an apostolic exhortation warning that the "tyranny of capitalism" is propelling all towards "disintegration and death". Right-wing know-it-all blowhards such as Rush Limbaugh have predictably slammed Pope Francis's critique as "pure Marxism", but one doesn't need the ideological shackles of Marxist doctrine to realize what is becoming increasingly apparent.

For instance, there's the financial crisis of 2008 from which we never really recovered, and the consequences of which are merely being held at bay with unsustainable financial gimmickry such as the Zero Interest Rate Policy and everlasting Quantitative Easing. What brought this about was an orgy of greed and corruption driven both by shady financiers and consumers eager to use their houses as an ATM for fueling their out-of-control consumption. There's the fact that the ability of the planet to sustain life is being dealt body-blow after body-blow. Everybody knows about global warming, even if they're in denial about it. But how many people know that the oceans are dying? For pity's sake, the oceans are where life on this planet began!

But this Black Friday ugliness really draws a big red circle around the fact that it isn't just the big capitalists and corrupt politicians who are to blame for the mess we're facing. It's ordinary people who don't know any better who are a big reason why nothing has changed despite how obvious it has been for so long that something must change if we are to avoid a very nasty collision with some very severe consequences. This Black Friday ugliness is a good example of why our collective foot is going to remain on the proverbial gas-pedal right up until this collision occurs. There's no point in being bitter about it because being bitter has never helped anything. But I must confess to being more than a little alarmed, dismayed, and yes, downright afraid.

So in closing, I'll just turn the microphone over to Chris Hedges, who as always gets to the heart of the matter much better than I ever could.

Debt ceiling political crisis

A lot of bandwidth has been used up by various liberal analyses of the debt ceiling hub-bub, but what it boils down to is that it's really an entirely premeditated crisis. And the reason for it is because the white-supremacist coalition that has been running this country for the past three decades, as well as the value system associated with it, is on the verge of becoming a minority political tendency in this country. (And it is this coaltion, by the way, whom we can thank for having to settle for the sort of "halfway healthcare reform" represented by Obamacare, because they killed true universal healthcare before I or Barack Obama were even born.) The most fanatical acolytes of this political tendency would rather destroy the country they claim to love so fetishistically, than allow that to happen. They may have thought that they were on the rise with the Republican victories in 2010, but the fact that more votes for Congress were cast for Democrats than Republicans (Republicans retaining their majority in the house with brazen and desperate gerrymandering) in 2012, shows us that 2010 was merely a swan song. After all, the same state that handed Scott Walker a victory in the recall election, also went for Obama and sent Tammy Baldwin to the Senate a mere few months later. So I guess I'm back on board with the Democrats for a while, as long as the alternative is a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth Klansmen who want to drive the country over the edge of a cliff.

But of course, there is a much bigger story at work behind the scenes, which is well summarized by Reverse Engineer over at Doomstead Diner. This really explains as well as anyone could why the problems this country is facing in the near future aren't like those in the past, and claiming otherwise is just the rankest sort of denial. So given that, yes, I believe that collapse is inevitable and unpreventable because the whole system is in a rather more fragile state than most people seem to want to realize. Austrian-school economists such as Peter Schiff think we shouldn't raise the debt ceiling no matter what and face the pain of a serious depression, and then the Magick Market will eventually fix everything and we can all live in a devil-take-the-hindmost libertarian paradise with a gold-backed currency. It's a pretty little fantasy, to be sure, but it only goes to show how both Keynsians and Austrians blind themselves to the deeper reality by clinging to the insane notion that you can have infinite growth on a finite planet. I guess I just want to delay the disaster until some of my current health problems improve somewhat. Though a doomer case can certainly be made for embracing an economic depression.

And speaking of the Archdruid, his own perspective on the shutdown and the fiscal cliff also provides much-needed context and food for thought.

And as long as I'm piling on links, here's another way of explaining the same situation.

Atheist-skeptic fanatics: Just another variant of Hofferian True Believerism

I wasn't exactly bowled over by revelations of obnoxoius and virulent sexism among male atheist-skeptic zealots. These people subscribe to a world view every bit as rigid, intolerant, and often hateful as any fundamentalist religionist, so it's not exactly a surprise that both these kinds of Hofferian True Believer would have misogynistic (and by extension homophobic) bigotry in common. Another common trait of True Believers is their pathetic inability to look in the mirror, ever.

Wow. And ouch.

"If liberals are so fucking smart, then how come they lose so goddamn always?"

I'm not saying I'm absolutely committed to being a nonvoter, but if I do choose to vote for Democrats in a given election, I refuse to emotionally invest in it in any way, I refuse to give them any money whatsoever, and I'm just not going to talk about it or even read websites and blogs that prop up the codependent-doormat Democratic Party faith. That misbegotten phase of my life is now finished.

Systematic vote-rigging in the USA

If this is true, and it very well could be, I don't really expect the Democratic Party to do anything about it. After all, they just sat on their hands and played dumb when the election-rigging was obvious in the 2004 presidential election. If there is any solution to the problems this country faces, it is sheer foolishness to think that voting will solve them. The United States of America is now a civil-libertarian constitutional republic in name only. Never mind the fact that the Democratic Party is utterly devoted to upholding the status quo in all its dysfunctional inglory. As if this weren't enough, movement-conservative Republican reactionaries would take away the right to vote from anybody whose net worth falls below a certain level.

And let us not forget the fact the Democratic National Committee was all too happy to let the Wisconsin recall effort wither on the proverbial vine.

An exchange with the Archdruid

In my initial comment on John Michael Greer's most recent post, I expressed some frustration with those who cling to supporting the Democratic Party despite its long history, among other vexatious habits, of bringing a rubber dagger to a sword-fight in how it deals with political contests. This was JMG's reply:

"a rubber dagger to a sword fight" is a nice crisp description. The problem with the Dems these days, as I see it, is that the DNC gets more money when they lose than when they win -- Dubya was a financial godsend to them -- and since they don't have, as the GOP does, an agenda to push -- that's why every Democratic president since 1980 has simply copied whatever the last successful GOP president did -- the temptation to throw elections, and profit from the flood of panicked donations from supporters, is very strong.

My response:

As it happens, I have a classic example of what you are describing. On the eve of Election 2004, I was as fired up as any Dem, so much so that I gave $50 to a telephone-fundraiser for John Kerry who contacted me. About two years or so later, I found out that Kerry had a slush-fund of leftover donations he obtained for the 2004 campaign he had never actually spent, which meant that he was holding onto they money I had given him that he had deceptively procured in order to further his own future political ambitions. And of course, in the Election of 2004, the Republicans blatantly and openly stole the election in Ohio (and probably Florida again as well), and the Democrats once again responded by sitting on their hands and playing dumb!

There is also the relentless torrent of political spam I get in my e-mail inbox in which the Democratic Party and its operative and front-groups try to parlay every single little thing that happens (including the recent embarassing defeat in Wisconsin's recall election) into a donation. {SIGH!} Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an episode of one of those comedy cartoon-shows such as "The Simpsons" or "Family Guy".

JMG's response:

bingo. Most people I know who support the Dems have had identical experiences in recent years.

Bone-us post-recall stuff

Chris Hedges writing at Adbusters.org pretty well sums up why I am done with the politics industry in this country.

Steve from Virginia provides some much-needed collapse-blogger perspective on the Wisconsin recall defeat.

And here's a repost of Mark Ames's updated version of his famous missive about spite-voters, which goes a long way towards explaining why the recall failed and why the left in this country will always live in a civics-class "La-La Land" about the social and political realities of our society.

So why again am I such a terrible person for not wanting to support the Obama Administration unconditionally to the bitter end?

Speaking of which, The Archdruid John Michael Greer more than redeems himself in my eyes with what could be viewed as food for thought for Democratic (as well as Republican) Party Kool-Aid drinkers.

The Hysteric Wisconsin Recall Erection

Where to begin, where to begin? Well, I'll start with geography. When I look at the map of Wisconsin for this election and consider the counties that went "blue" and also ones that went "red" (back when I was a young, BTW, red was used for Democrats and blue for Republicans, perhaps owing to the fact that the Cold War was still going) where the race was fairly close, I see that the central and northern sections of the state are pretty much a red state, including Green Bay, a pretty major city. The major "blue" islands in this are La Crosse, Eau Claire (Walker won in EC County, but it was very close), and my hometown of Stevens Point, which may surprise the casual observer seeing as how Stevens Point is rather smaller than those first two cities I just listed. Stevens Point probably is the Midwest's "bluest" small town. So I guess it really shouldn't come as much of a shock that Yours Truly is from there. That really makes me feel badly about all the mean things I ever said about the place just because I was picked on so much when I was a teenager there so many years ago. After all, it could have been so much worse, couldn't it?

Predictably, the only counties where Barrett "kicked ass" the way Walker did in so many northerly counties including Brown County (where Green Bay is located) were Dane County, where Madison is located, and also Milwaukee County. If one were to extract the metropolitan areas of Milwaukee, Madison, Kenosha, and Racine, Walker's margin of victory would have been rather greater, which essentially makes this a rebuke of blue-state, urban, southerly Wisconsin by red-state, rural, northerly Wisconsin. Walker won Racine County, but that's mostly because the county west of State Highway 36 has more in common socially and politically with neighboring Walworth County. That also brings up the fact that even "blue" southern Wisconsin has a very serious "red patch" between Madison and Milwaukee. The major city of Waukesha is the exemplar of these conservative strongholds. Waukesha County, by the way, is the third most populous county in the state after Milwaukee and Dane.

Next, the unions. They fucked up. Again. They supported a political hack named Kathleen Falk with four million dollars that Tom Barrett's seriously underfunded campaign war-chest could have used. However, I don't know how much of that extra four million Barrett actually could have used, because Wisconsin campaign law gives the incumbent in a recall election more spending-leeway than the challenger in terms of financing. There was no way Falk was going to win the primary, and even more no way she was going to win the general recall election. There was no real grassroots support for her outside of union activists either. And they did this because Falk promised to be their lapdog to the extent of refusing to sign any budget that didn't reinstate public-worker collective-bargaining rights. That would have made her the left-wing equivalent of Scott Walker, holding the state's ability to operate hostage to forcing through a partisan political agenda. Unions will only continue to lose ground if they think they can get away pissing off what few friends they have remaining. I still think what John Michael Greer said about unions being as corrupt and narcissistic as the corporations was a ridiculous hyper-generalization. But the unions' behavior here, as well as the existence of too many corrupt union organizations, shows that there are just enough grains of truth in his statement to make unions a disappointment to those who support them. Other collapse bloggers I read who are pretty reality-based are also pessimistic about the notion of unions offering any constructive solutions to the problems society will face in this new century.

Last and absolutely least is the damn pathetic-loser Democratic Party itself and why I am finally done with it, even to the point of conceding the field to the despicable Republicans. Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee were going to write off the Wisconsin recall and only kicked in a million dollars at the last minute because their Wisconsin adherents shamed them into it. Even so, Walker was still able to vastly outspend Barrett. Still, the Republican National Committee put their full might behind Walker, and the DNC gave the most tepid support it possibly could. Also, even though Barrett is a good man who would have made a fine governor, he was a less-than-ideal candidate for a crucial election such as this, and it's sad that this was the best that the Democratic Party of Wisconsin could do.

But that wasn't entirely what finalized my decision to be done with the politics industry in this country. What really did it was the codependent-doormat Democratic Party Kool-Aid drinkers who have made the question of whether or not supporting the Democrats is a worthwhile endeavor, into an entirely nonfalsifiable hypothesis. What is downright knee-slapping hilarious is that so many of these same people are such braying-jackass know-it-all atheist-skeptic fanatics, the very crowd who supposedly rejects the very notion of nonfalsifiable hypotheses! (See Reddit.com for an illustration of to what specifically I am referring.) The level of cognitive dissonance the Democratic Party loyalists have had to indulge in order to hold on to that loyalty as the party increasingly abandons liberal values and priorities, is truly something else. It really goes to show that human beings really do have a built-in need to believe in something, even if that something never does anything other than give its believers black eyes and broken noses in the form of sorely disappointed expectations.

In the wake of the recall debacle, I fully expect the Democratic Party Kool-Aid drinkers to trot out the same old tired and shopworn high-minded justifications that will only result in further frustration and fruitless expectations. When exactly did kidding yourself ad infinitum, as opposed to facing reality, become a mark of courage and intelligence? If I could send a message back in time to myself as a nineteen-year-old boy (and believe me, I was a boy, as opposed to a man, in a huge and major way), it would be this: "Don't even fucking bother. Your high-minded political endeavors and aspirations will always and without exception be frustrated and disappointed as the society in which you live terminally deteriorates. This deterioration is not only because of the dysfunctional nature of the society itself, but also because of the extraordinary pressures bearing down upon it in the form of encroaching energy-and-resource scarcity. And every time you emotionally invest in that useless politics crap, it will in one way or another drag your spirit down into the muck. And in your woefully developmentally-arrested state, your focus really needs to be becoming a spiritual adult, which will take everything you've got, considering how little help for that sort of thing there is in society."

I may not be able to send any such messages back in time, but I can heed the message now. That is why I will no longer even be paying attention to Democratic-Party-oriented blogs, podcasts, and whatever else. If other people want to continue to invest themselves in such things, that's really no skin off my nose considering that whatever is going to happen is simply going to happen regardless of any political agitation from the left. That these people so often need to excoriate those who have realized what I have realized tends to demonstrate that they know deep down inside that we are mostly right. Nonetheless, stooping to deliberately antagonize those who still favor the blue, blue Kool-Aid only makes you even more ridiculously codependent than they are. Instead, one should do what one believes one must do while just letting them do what it is they feel they must do. It's not rocket-science, folks.

The coming of the sort of plutocratic-fundamentalist dictatorship that Scott Walker's victory represents makes societal collapse-scenarios worse rather than better, but given human nature in these situations, it is certainly not entirely unexpected. Anyway, given that anyone with a real voice in the political process is thoroughly dedicated to the insane proposition of pursuing infinite growth on a finite planet, I guess there was really no way any of this was going to end well, was there? All you can do is just accept reality and strive to put your own spiritual house in order as best you can.

Anything else there is to be said about the hysteric Wisconsin recall (I done made teh funnee!) is more than adequately done by these further postmortems to which I will now link:

"How Walker Really Won Wisconsin" by Jeffrey Sommers writing at Counterpunch.org. I particularly like this one because it really echoes what I said about why the recall might fail. That really only goes to show that the more right you are, the more shit you'll get for it.

"How The Wisconsin Solidarity Movement Failed" by Matthew Rothschild writing at the online edition of Madison's free alternative weekly The Isthmus. (Anybody remember, "If it's Thursday, Isthmus be Madison"? Mildly clever, even though it didn't really make any semantic sense. I miss Madison.)

Bone-us article: Incumbent Governor Scott Walker's doctored employment numbers were a complete fabrication.

And for no other reason except to be wildly inappropriate, here's another picture of Charlie McDermott in his boxer shorts:

Hot guy of the week

A new feature now that I'm going to be somewhat tweaking the emphasis of this blog.

Recall election today

I'm so afraid that today will be the day my beloved home state does a "Humpty-Dumpty" on my heart. :-(

Recall update

My mother recently informed me that the Democratic National Committee finally came through on the Wisconsin recall race by ponying up a million dollars to match the million Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett already has in his meager war-chest. Walker has raised $25 million, so I think the DNC should have coughed up at least two million so that Barrett would have about ten percent of what Walker has. (Yes, I have made what for me is a substantial contribution.) The fact that the DNC had to be shamed into contributing this relatively paltry sum makes it very easy for me to place at least some of the blame on them if we lose this crucial battle. In a way, that will be good, because then I can cut politics and the Democratic Party out of my life and just focus on making my peace with the Spirit. I think a lot of us will be meeting our maker sooner rather than later, so that really seems like the most constructive thing to be doing right now. This will be especially true if the USA becomes the plutocratic police-state from which the Democratic Party is extremely unlikely to save us. Kidding ourselves about such things will not help us achieve the spiritual balance we will need to deal with what's coming down the road.

Don't be fooled. If the DNC hadn't been shamed into stepping up to the plate, the amount they would have contributed up until now would have been mere chump-change. If we recall Scott Walker and flip the state senate, I will gladly admit that I've been a big doomy silly-billy. But considering how close that the polls show this race to be (and given the Republican track-record of successfully stealing close elections), I don't think it's at all inappropriate to get ready to face some grim and harsh realities.\

Update: The current composition of the state senate doesn't really matter very much. The districts were recently gerrymandered in Republican favor by Walker and his legislative enablers, so come the next regular election in November, the state senate will almost certainly re-flip Walker-Republican.

Confession and analysis I

Inevitably, the question arises of how it came to be that I developed this tendency to become so mired in my own angry, unhappy thoughts and feelings despite having metaphysically known better than that for at least fifteen years. Usually when I do self-analysis such as this, I take a two-sided-coin approach. One side is my own personal side, the other side is the influence of society.

My own personal issue in this regard would appear to be a problem I have observed to be endemic to homosexual men. (I don't really like the word "gay" because I detest the whole subculture quite intensely.) This problem is a tendency to just wallow for the sake of wallowing in some very nasty, negative, garbagey emotional stuff that just leads nowhere. It's all too easy to point to a dizzy queen at the gay bar who is living a life of rampant promiscuity, substance-abuse, and vicious social games as the cardinal example of this, but this post isn't about those dizzy queens, it's about me. I think if there is anything it is imperative for a young homosexual man to learn to avoid falling into the trap into which I have fallen, it's that you need to recognize the symptoms of such wallowing and train yourself to snap out of it. Some of these symptoms in my own case have been feeling sorry for myself, getting stuck in a pattern of thinking of myself as a perpetual victim, boiling over with bitter resentment over every disappointment and setback, and letting all these things shape every aspect of how I view my life. This problem got so very deep-rooted that it took me all these years to start making real progress in digging this toxic tree out of the yard of my existential life, the roots were just so thick, so deep, and so wide-ranging. It probably also didn't help that I have a tendency to get lazy and complacent about myself to the extent that I just let personal baggage pile up continuously, when I what I need to be doing is treating it as bags of garbage that need to be taken out to the curb before they stink up the whole damn house.

Society's contribution has been in the influences to which I believe I have been exposed. Positive influences that might have taught me mature, broad-minded, enobling attitudes and behaviors have been very few and far between. Instead, that of which I had rather more was influences that taught me self-centered, small-minded, willfully ignorant attitudes and behaviors. This is not to say that there weren't good influences sprinkled in here and there. What precious little there was should really be called precious because that's what may have saved me from becoming a permanent hopeless embarassment to my Higher Soul. But that it's no surprise that there was so little and that I was poisoned so badly by the negative influences really makes a sad statement about where we are as a society. And this quite frankly has a lot to do with why my own "doomerism" can often get as lugubrious as it does. It also didn't help that middle-class American society filled my mind with priorities and expectations that just ended up being part of that mountain of garbage-bags in the house that needed to be taken out to the curb.

How did Wisconsin become so politically divided?

The magazine of The New York Times answers the question with this long but worthwhile read.

What I don't understand

If a liberal Democrat working for a high-profile Democratic Party politician were ever formally charged with embezzling funds intended for veterans and their families in addition to sexual enticement of a minor, you would be hearing about it from reactionary hate-radio, Faux News, and movement conservatives running down the street screaming about it so much, you would be positively sick of it. But when Republicans who work for Scott Walker do these things, we hear nary a peep about it from anybody, with the possible exception of a handful of bloggers.

Wisconsin recall

So Tom Barrett finally got bizzee and declared his candidacy a month before the early-May primary and soundly defeated that popinjay Kathleen Falk. I voted for Barrett in this primary, obviously. But some people are kind of freaked that the votes for Walker in the primary (Walker had a long-shot libertarian-Republican from Madison running against him) somewhat surpassed the total of votes cast for Democratic candidates. I wouldn't read too terribly much into that. We already know that Walker has a substantial and motivated movement-conservative base, and the recallistas probably figured Barrett would win the primary and they were going to vote for whoever was chosen to run against Walker anyhow.

Of more concern is that most polls show the race to be a virtual dead-heat, and one recent poll has even shown Walker to be ahead by five percentage points. And about a third of all union-members and their families actually support Walker. I attribute that to the animus movement-conservatism has created against public employees supposedly living high on the proverbial hog on the taxpayer dime. Wisconsin is dead last in job creation for 2011, and a major scandal implicating Walker during his term as Milwaukee County Executive is brewing. There is also the bill Walker signed into law undermining pay-equality for women. And how about that video of Walker telling a billionaire donor that he was planning on using a "divide and conquer" strategy in order to turn Wisconsin into a Mississippi-style "right to work" state? And despite all this, the race is nonetheless in this dead-heat. So what is the lesson here?

The lesson is one taught by Adolf Hitler that our owning class has very seriously taken to heart, and it is simply that Proppaganda Works. It can be brazen, unvarnished proppaganda, but it will still work if it is sufficiently loud and pervasive. The far-right corporate money to which Walker has access is no match for the paltry sums mustered by Tom Barrett and his supporters. And it isn't just the proppaganda associated with this particular recall election. More than three decades of blaring, strident movement-conservative proppaganda, whose latter-day manifestations are reactionary hate-radio and Fox News, have laid the groundwork for the horror now unfolding in Wisconsin. But if you live in Wisconsin and you're reading this and you're not one of the bad guys or one of those silly people seduced by that "both sides are equally bad in the same way" nonsense, please vote regardless.

But if I were a completely dispassionate political analyst on a flying-saucer observing the situation in Wisconsin from space, I would have to call the recall election for Walker. And that's because in order to defeat an incumbent Republican official with a substantial and motivated popular base, there has to be a clear and obvious majority (at least consistently 55% or more in polling) against them. We just don't have that. And even if it's a 51/49 victory for the Democrats (not guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination) we all know damn well what always happens. Republicans brazenly and openly steal the election using some sort of shenanigans, and the Democratic Party heirarchy just sits on its hands and plays dumb. Extrapolating future trends based on what has happened in the recent past is a useful guide for predicting the behavior of both dysfunctional individuals and dysfunctional societies. Having been a rather predictable dysfunctional individual for quite a while, I should know!