Our courageous Republican governors stop public employee looting of taxpayer money!

Or not.

Life-changing events

There's this TV show called "The Middle" where the teenage character Axl Heck has an school-assignment where he has to write an essay on an event or situation that was "life-changing" for him. Of course, it turned out that Axl was so shallow that he had to copy virtually verbatim an essay his much smarter younger brother did on another subject entirely.

Axl Heck in his boxers, the main reason I watch "The Middle".

While I am not similarly afflicted with such shallowness, the obstacle that comes to mind for writing such an essay about myself is rather sheer pathos. The life-changing event that comes to mind for me is a poignant symbol of what an utter dribble-glass my social life as an adult has been to date. This event was being forced to realize at the end of attending college that the venal little fools of the "PC" college-campus scene were never really my friends and that they weren't going to effect any sort of change upon our troubled society.

The reason I threw in my social lot with those little cretins in the first place is because my fantasies of what my life would be in college turned out to be, well, nothing more than mere fantasies. So I did what a lot of ignorant young losers with no imagination did and associated with other ignorant young losers with no imagination. But such people are often very neurotic and turn their coats upon one another at the drop of a hat. Any hat. Of course, I eventually found myself at the receiving end of such treatment.

I can look back at it now and recognize that it was spiritually necessary for me to be separated from that whole dysfunctional, constricting scene. After all, I had the potential to be something better than that, even if I wasn't that much of an improvement over those people in my current form of the time. But what was life-changing was not so much the social dissociation from the denizens of the PC scene as it was the disillusionment with myself. I was forced to realize that everything I imagined myself to be was just more fantasy-notions I had cooked up in the kitchen of my ego-imagination. When those notions were dispelled, I found out there really wasn't very much of substance holding together and coordinating the disparate pieces of myself. One of the reasons I became insulin-resistant and then diabetic relatively early on was because there was nothing left for me except staying trapped in isolation in a spiritually and physically unhealthy life.

So if you would have any insight into why I can be so casually pessimistic in my evaluation of society's and humanity's future, this is should provide you with some. I have done myself disservices by kidding myself with codependent fantasy-notions that the real world would never facilitate or validate, so much so that I have developed something of an allergy to doing that. Having been such a huge loser has made me averse to loserish non-solutions to society's problems. When I look back at my own life and see how some consistent honesty with myself would have benefitted my personal development, I can't help but want to look at the world in which I live, as well as myself at this time in my life, with the same sort of point-blank honesty.

The challenge in that is refrain from losing your mind upon conceiving just how fucked up everything else is. And that necessarily must start with ceasing to cultivate more codependent nonsense. My honesty forces me to realize that I failed to apply myself consistently to that project in the closing years of the previous decade. So that means it behooves me in the opening years of this new decade to make this a priority.

There were other things too besides what I'm relating in this one little blog-post. But to what it all boils down is that things might have been different for me had I refrained from looking at the world around me through such thick gauze of fantasy-notions. It logically follows that I just don't want to indulge that error anymore.

So much for that Ron Paul guy

Hacktivist group Anonymous exposes direct ties between Ron Paul and white supremacist groups.

About Iran

What Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque said.

A little codependency antidote for y'all

Lost On The Fearless Plain, one of Joe Bageant's last and best essays.

This crap again

Is it fair to say that Democrats are every bit as bad as Republicans? No, of course it isn't, but that isn't the question. It never was. All the initiatives that make society worse come from Republicans. That much is clear. The real question is, are the Democrats an adequate and effective counterweight against Republican outrages, or does their ineptitude and lack of real conviction on its leadership levels cause them to play an enabling role? I really think you have to be drinking some pretty heavy-duty Kool-Aid not to realize that "B" is the correct answer.

What's going on with the recall election against Scott Walker is a very instructive example. Thousand of volunteers collected twice the number of signatures necessary to make the recall happen, and this despite assaults and threats from the pig-ignorant racists and rednecks who support Scott Walker. So how is the Democratic Party hierarchy rewarding this display of political faith and dedication? With about the level of feckless ineptitude political observers have come to expect from them.

Right now the Democrats don't really have the strong political figure necessary to oppose Scott Walker. So of course, the Democrats are gearing up for what I call a "clown-car" primary. This refers to a primary election so cluttered with inferior candidates that it becomes difficult for a strong candidate to emerge in the lead. In a recall election such as this, a clown-car primary makes the challengers waste time, manpower, and resources on this process, while the incumbent side is able to focus on gearing up to fight the challenge.

I'm not exactly impressed with Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, either. With Governor Jim Doyle stepping down, it was he who ran against Scott Walker for the governor's seat in November 2010. It was close enough that it was obvious that the only reason Walker won was because it was a fear-and-discontent-driven wave-election. And President Obama bears at least some responsibility for that by 1) ramming unpopular healthcare "reform" down the country's throat [seriously, making everybody buy health insurance from private industry at rates to be determined by that industry; how is that not going to be a disaster?] and 2) filling his administration with the same old Wall Street crony capitalists who got us into the mess in which we no find ourselves, thus ensuring that nothing changes and none of those fat-cats will face any consequences. Polls also indicate that Barrett is as close to a popular leadership-figure as we're going to get. But right now Barrett is dithering about a rematch election because he might not be able to focus on being re-elected Mayor of Milwaukee if he does that. For fuck's sake, we need real leaders right now, not careerist-politicians who are more concerned with their own perquisites and position than what a crucial moment such as this demands.

And if the Scott Walker Republicans win this election by totally lying, cheating, and stealing just like you can consistently count on them to do, what might you expect from the Democrats in that situation? You can be pretty sure they would sit on their hands and play dumb just like they did on the national level in both 2000 and 2004. I would seriously love nothing more than to be proven wrong on this one, but I have found that in the sphere of human events (especially in a very dysfunctional situation), there are few more effective ways to predict the future than to extrapolate based on the relatively recent past. Those who do otherwise are generally motivated by a strong desire to deceive themselves.

Don't get me wrong. I will still go to the polls and vote for whoever the candidate opposing Scott Walker is, even if I have to hold my nose. (Former Congressman David Obey is the only prospective candidate for whom I can see myself having to do said holding. He's an asshole, basically.) Expecting a perfect candidate is certainly a good way to set oneself up for disappointment, especially when we're talking about the Democrats. But I have to be honest that what I'm seeing going on right now is every bit as dismaying as it is unsurprising.

Why the recall against Scott Walker could fail

This is basically a comment I made on a blog-entry well worth reading, Waking Up And Walking Away by John Michael Greer, AKA "The Archdruid".

My comment:

As long as I've brought up the subject of Governor Scott Walker, your post this week made me realize some things about the groundswell of popular opinion against him here in Wisconsin. About a year ago when the massive demonstrations against his anti-union policies were occuring in Madison, it was really good to see so many people caring about those issues. But I couldn't help but wonder why they were caring now and not thirty, twenty, or even ten years ago.

And the answer is that Walker's moves against public employees are an assault on the middle class, whereas in the past, the policy-assaults were mostly on the laboring class. And this probably explains the puzzling number of white working-class people who support Scott Walker. On a level these people likely don't even entirely recognize, they are probably thinking, "You middle-class liberals didn't care when people like me were having our lives ground into sausage by those rich people!" I like to think that I cared at least at little, but I have pretty much been a rather marginalized and isolated person ever since being forced to realize that the denizens of the college "PC" scene weren't really my friends.

Here is JMG's response:

Mister R., bingo! When the blue collar jobs were the ones being thrown under the bus, the middle class was babbling horseradish about the wonderful new globalized economy, and how everybody (meaning, of course, everybody in their class) would prosper in it. Now it's the turn of the middle class to go under the bus, and the survivors of the old working class are not impressed by the screams of outrage.

The clown-car primary for which the strategically-incompetent Democrats are currently gearing up may be one reason the recall election might fail to oust Governor Scott Walker from office. But the main reason it could fail is that bitter, alienated working-class people could well turn out in droves to make sure that the ultimate fate of middle-class liberals gets tossed into the wood-chipper the way the fate of their class was tossed into the wood-chipper all those years ago. And it's not entirely undeserved, either.

I remember the Eighties and the Nineties, and the tacit subtext of socio-economic discussions amongst middle-class liberals back then was that laboring-class folk are not among The People Who Matter in the new exegesis of the age. And that has a lot to do with why so many working-class men tune in to right-wing talk-radio to hear Rush Limbaugh stroke their mad-on about upper-middle-class liberals. And why does one suppose that Republican wave-elections such as 2010 and 1994 are such tidal waves, whereas Democratic wave-elections such as 2006 and 2008 are more like municipal-swimming-pool-on-a-windy-day waves? There is an invisible class of dispossessed caucasians in this country who are the children of the rural underclass, and it is because these people feel so forgotten about that they can be counted on to put Republicans in office out of ignorance and spite when they bother to vote.

Without a doubt, putting Republicans in office will cause their lot to deteriorate more quickly. But their lot has been getting worse for so long with nobody really seeming to care that much that they figure it will get worse no matter what, so why not speed it up a bit in order to stick to the assholes who let them down? It's not a very rational line of thinking to be sure, but human nature just ain't rational. Never has been, never will be.

I guess that has a lot to do with my decision to just "let it all go and let it all die" if Scott Walker's tenure in the governor's mansion survives the recall. Sometimes you have to accept the fact that whatever is going to happen is simply going to happen and have peace over it.

For more insight into this phenomenon, here's a reworked version of Exiled.com editor and writer Mark Ames's classic Spite The Vote.

See also Chris Hedges on the death of the liberal class.

SOPA and PIPA

I urge the very tiny handful of people who might see this blog today to contact their Federal representative and Senators about these very fucked-up pieces of Internet-targeted legislation that are currently pending in Congress.

The Wisconsin recall effort

Recall organizers say they have more than one million signatures against Scott Walker.

State Dem Chair Mike Tate said the party would oppose any efforts by the Government Accountability Board to unnecessarily delay certifying an election. He also suggested the agency should certify an election once it counts the 540,208 valid signatures needed and could then finish going through the rest later.

“We clearly believe there is no challenge, legal or otherwise, that would prevent the recalls from going forward,” Tate said.

Tate said the party did not have exact numbers because signatures continued to roll in this morning. But he said in addition to the more than 1 million against Walker, recall organizers had more than 845,000 against Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, more than 21,000 against state Sen. Terry Moulton of Chippewa Falls, more than 21,000 against state Sen. Pam Galloway of Wausau and more than 24,000 against Van Wanggaard of Racine.

A band I would have loved back in the day had I known of them

The drummer is smokin' hot. Or was, as that hard-rocker lifestyle may have taken its toll on him all these years later!

Evolving philosophy of life (A rewrite of something earlier I decided to scrub)

My fundamental premise remains that we live in a shit-encrusted write-off of a society. But if other people want to codependently cling to false hope about it, one should just let them do that and not get all hot and bothered or need to act out about it. For one thing, if other people are being codependent, you're not going to disabuse them of that because a cardinal characteristic of codependency is clinging to something that doesn't really work with a white-knuckled death-grip. For another thing, if you feel you should be giving other people attitude because they are supposedly being codependent, then it is you who is being codependent, and that is that codependency you need to be trying to change. You need to be taking care of your own business and not using what other people are being, doing, or having as an excuse to behave foolishly. This really should be "no-duh" stuff, but if you live in a society that does its level-best to drive you insane every day, then you need to make a point of reminding yourself of "no-duh" stuff such as this every day.

Besides, if whatever is going to happen is going to happen regardless of what we do, then why get all worked up over things that are not your concern or that you certainly can't change? Your priority needs to be working on your own spiritual life in such a situation. As I've said before, there is no thought more truly despairing than believing that your life lacks all meaning if you can't change situations or people in the dysfunctional society in which you live.

My favorite parody of "Strong"

Okay, I guess I'm a Democrat again. Kind-of-sort-of. For now.

Michigan Pee Tardy GOP passes law effectively giving a "license to bully" for "religious or moral" reasons.

Fuck these fucking racist, redneck motherfuckers with a fucking rusty chainsaw.

The Tea Party does the unforgivable

Namely making me almost enthusiastic about the prospect of voting for the Democrats again. Bastards!

Update to my political post of 10/16

The more I learn about the crop of Republicans who identify with the "Tea Party" label, the more I realize that they are irrational right-wing extremist whom one shouldn't want calling any shots during a collapse-situation such as the one our society is currently facing. They are so irrational and extreme, in fact, that even the Reverend Pat Robertson is telling them to cool their heels!



How da fuck do ya like that?

That these nuts would come to power in the previous election was an unfortunate inevitability given 1) the intense motivation of the right-wing fanatics and 2) the frightened and desperate mood of an ignorant electorate. But now I'm hoping now that these nut-cases have shown to what they're truly dedicated, the electorate will generate a wave in the opposite direction. After all, there are many vitriolic criticisms one may make of the Democratic Party, but one thing you will never see them do is indulge extremism for extremism's sake. They're such triangulators by nature, they would simply be incapable of it!

But at the same time, I refuse to invest any faith in the Democratic Party beyond replacing the right-wing loonies with politicians who are at least willing to pay lip-service to the concept of being reasonable. Even if I did wish to emotionally invest myself in a Democratic victory, I've been like Charlie Brown getting the football pulled away by Lucy too many times to be even capable of such an investment any longer. I have had my fill of the empty and contrived civic religion in which way too many Democratic Party supporters traffic. And I have no doubt that in the event of a Democratic "wave" in late 2012, our favorite Party for the Losers will govern another few steps to the right thanks to the tone set by the "Pee Tardy".

If the next election is another Republican victory or a stalemate, however, I think I will give up entirely on all but local politics after that. What hope would there be, after all, for an electorate so ignorant that they won't get up off their lazy asses to push a bunch of crazy people out of power during a time when one needs such people in power about as much as one needs a hole in the head????

Gotta love US national politics. :-/ But sometimes you just have to put your ego aside and do something you find distasteful in order to avoid an outcome that could well be rather beyond distasteful!

What I learned about collapse this year

This is primarily in regards, like much of this blog, to how to deal with collapse on an individual, spiritual level. Many of us will likely be meeting our maker as a consequence of unfolding collapse, especially those of us with chronic illnesses such as diabetes. That is why one's spiritual attitude towards these events is of the utmost importance.

One thing is clear: What you must not do is take an attitude towards collapse issues that could be characterized as either hysterical or lugubrious. And it should really go without saying that one absolutely shouldn't be gleefully misanthropic about the human tragedy that the collapse of industrial civilization will represent. These wrong-minded attitudes come from the ego and only lead to self-defeating and counterproductive social acting out. Acting like a deranged teenager isn't going to help anything or anybody.

What you should cultivate is inner peace and wisdom. These are the things that will keep people balanced and mature as things become increasingly dire. This does not mean kidding oneself that society's problems are going to have any sort of conventional political solution. One may, for instance, understandably vote in such a way as to decant the irrational right-wing extremists from political power next year because you don't want people like that making important decisions in a collapse-situation. But it would still be a mistake to invest any hope as such in the political establishment as it is currently constituted. Kidding oneself about what's going on and emotionally investing oneself in the deception will only court great disappointment.

However, community involvement is something real and substantial into which to invest oneself because we will need to rely on one another to deal with the realities of collapse. So if one is going to be involved in politics, local politics is definitely the place to be active. And local politics is always going to be the politics which are most immediately about you and your family and your neighbors. So even though that may well be frustrating too, it is also the area that is likely to be rewarding.

In our spiritual orientation, we should seek to put aside ego-investments of all varieties, because collapse will teach us in no uncertain terms just how little the realities of this world care about the fantasies to which we cling to keep ourselves going. And we must not flinch from looking honestly at our own behavior to see if fear of the harsh future is making us lapse back into the sort of bad old social habits we are better off outgrowing. Maturity and realism are the keys to dealing with collapse constructively, not kidding yourself and getting caught up in your old ego-garbage.

As long as we're talking about the Democratic Party...

...I figured that would be a good segue for this informative and helpful video called "Poopin' 2.O"! :-D

Koch to Hayek: Use social security if you come to the USA

There is just no fucking end to the hyprocrisy of these far-right plutocrats, is there?

"Rogue trader on BBC" follow-up

Brought to you courtesy of Yahoo News.

The song that inspired the name of this blog that hardly anybody really reads :-)

This would be a good point to call attention to the fact that I am the Commentor Formerly Known As Loveandlight. The Loveandlight moniker was one I adopted back in 2003 as a reminder to myself of the ultimate futility of flame-waring Internet behavior. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

But the world is heading into some very severe and dire times while way too many people want to just go on kidding themselves about what is truly happening, and I feel like telling the truth about that whether or not anybody feels like listening. In light of that, I decided I needed a rather less fluffy-bunny, New-Agey handle, so I chose one related to what I randomly decided to call my nonexistent blog back in May 2004. That was when I signed up for Blogger.com in order to be able to comment on another blog.

I must confess to feeling rather like an automaton who is just "going through the motions" of late. That is how Mister Roboto the doomer-blogger was born. At least this was a better idea than lugubriously acting out and taking myself way too seriously on other people's blogs. After all, I'm forty-four years old, and such acting out really is the province of teenagers and Tea Partiers.