MANIPULATING ILLUSION

It feels good to have the temperature up in the 50s for a change from in the 20s. Some people are talking like this is the end of winter, but I'm not going to count on that. Though global warming is ending winters sooner than before, still this is early March. Our blizzards come in late March. However, as we change toward warmer weather, when the blizzards happen will change too. I would like to see early March be the end of winter, but don't think I'll count on it this year. Maybe in a few more years winter will end this early. Winter is already ending a month before it used to. I'm grateful winters don't get as cold as they used to, start later and end earlier. As the people who study weather conditions are saying, the heat is set to go way up real fast in the near future. Is this why the rich are moving underground? Through Faux Noose the 1% keep the 99% fooled, at odds with each other and completely unprepared to save ourselves from the condition created by the 1% in process of draining resources from the 99%. We the American people have been plundered unto peasantry in my lifetime. It's weird to see, considering what I was taught in school about American government is every bit as irrelevant as evangelist Pat Robertson. In the time of Reagan I saw him making us into a Third World country. We are there. It has happened.

In this new century I see Latin America passing us by. Asia already has passed us. Europe is way out there beyond us. Africa will be passing us too. The wheel of fortune is turning, "What goes up, must come down, spinning wheel, spinning round." The Reaganista strategy of funnelling the money of the working people up to Cayman's Island bank accounts that are tax free, has pulled the rug out from We The People. Our whole nation is on the downward run. I can't help recalling CIA director with the Reagan Junta, William Casey's quote, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." So far, the Republican half of the population has fallen for the disinformation. With Faux Noose the Republican tv network, they ought to keep their idiocy to themselves. It looks really bad from outside the fold. They have become the "party of stupid" by believing their own disinformation. That's the funny part. I'm not going to tell them they have become self-defeating. They wouldn't listen anyway. I like seeing the party itself destroyed from within. The Republican party has become a cancer in American life. I'm glad to see the cancer they created is consuming them first. I'd like to see McConnell and Boner both put out in the next election. Of course, they'll be replaced by even worse than they are, but I won't have to see their ugly faces anymore and their deer-in-the-headlights eyes.

The party of stupid is holding back the rest of the country like the dumbest kids in class hold the class back for everybody else. The Republican party has become a ball and chain around the ankles of our country. If we have that many really dumb people, we don't have a chance. They want us uneducated so we'll be easier to manipulte. Plus, the uneducated tend not to vote. Working against education is Republican strategy to further block voting. They know as well as I know that voting doesn't matter, but it keeps the population believing in Santa Claus. Whoever wins an election is ruled by the 1%. All allegiance to the voters is over the moment the ballot count is announced. Running for election was playing pretend, and upon winning, the game continues to be pretend. Manipulating illusion. I question myself paying attention to them, and answer that I need to know that they are working against me, not for me. They hype that they're for me, but their actions show quite a different purpose. Again, white man's belief that he is superior to black man, Asian man, Latin man and all women is what is behind the Fall of America. The Reagan Junta was the puff of wind that started the fall of the tower of cards.

Herman Melville was writing in the 1850s that white man racism will bring down the ship of state. No one paid attention. The Civil War happened. Moby Dick wasn't read at all in this country. It was read and appreciated a little bit in London. It applies again today, again in a population that hasn't read Moby Dick and doesn't intend to. A century and a half later we're at the same place again, a nation divided unto civil war, the racists creating the problems and blaming the non-racist half of the white population called liberals. We, as a nation, do these things over and over because we, collectively, have no regard for history or education. To paraphrase Gore Vidal again, when the American people can't recognize stupid, we're done for. I've come to see it that alas, we do recognize stupid. It's what the majority wants. It's the Land of Oz, color tv round the clock, a hundred channels, only misinformation coming through the corporate media "news." Everything on television is saying: Stupid is beautiful. They say it's a big dumbing down of America, but I see dumb is what the population wants. It's American culture. White man is in crisis. White man has shown himself with no bottom to how low he will go to keep power over all other races and women. This is what I'm seeing happening in Congress and Senate, white man hysterical in crisis, so hysterical that they let their stupid hang out, like when you get so mad you start blubbering. Going by the pictures I see of Teabaggers, white man is very angry unto freaking out.


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OBAMA v WANNABE

he done it

It's the day after the so-called debate with Obama and Romney. I was driving home from visiting friends who live a half hour away. I heard it on the radio driving home, laughing much of the time, every time Romney spoke. He is the greatest comedy on the airwaves these days. He makes Bill Maher seem brilliant when I really don't believe he is. I was heartened somewhat to see that Obama was up to the game this time. I'd heard one report of the first "debate" that Denver is a mile above sea level and Obama went there directly from sea level, the air so thin his mind was befuddled. It's the best explanation I've heard for his dazed semi-absence during that hour on the air. I'd imagined Karl Rove would send Romney in with a new strategy the second time besides interrupting and changing the subject, winding Obama up in his own words. Evidently Rove did not have a new strategy for a surprise attack, which I don't get. Like it worked once, it will work again. But it didn't work again this time. Obama and staff realized these debates are not about information. Aggressive style is the debate form, and this time Obama and staff were ready.

I listened to what they were saying while driving and, like I said, laughed much of the time, derisive laughter at republican buffoonery that has become so absurd since 1980 when Reagan strategists stole the election with Central American drug money from CIA drug sales, buying a deal with the Ayatollah in Iran to arrange hostage release after Reagan wins, and not at all if Carter wins. It was outrageous at the time, the same kind of outrageous as the republican supreme court decision to give the win to the loser in 2000 and next to re-define corporations as people. Rove is using these debates to make some advances for Romney by twisting up Obama's words and history with nonsense. Of course, Rove uses nonsense for the trump card, which works consistently. It's Rove's particular style, his signature. Last night Obama was ready for it and countered the nonsense. I'm recalling a moment where Romney meant to trip Obama up accusing him of his record, waited for Obama to react and Obama said something to the effect of, "Proceed, governor." That tripped Romney into gibberish, gobbledy-gook that people fall into on the air when they lose their script. I'm recalling Tom Brokaw ad-libbing during a San Francisco earthquake, "San Francisco is an isthmus in the Pacific island." I don't laugh at him, I laugh at the phenomenon that is consistent. I too would stumble all over my words unscripted on the air.

That was the corner Obama put Romney into, handing him an unscripted moment. Like: Live through this! That, for me, was the cleverest moment in their aggressive verbiage. I noticed Obama made the audience laugh a few times. Lawyers tell me that if you can make the courtroom laugh during a jury trial, you've got it in the bag. The audience laughter told me what I'd already guessed, that Obama was in control this time. I can't really go by what I assess of their back and forth verbiage, because news analysts and republicans say something happened that I never noticed. These "debates" are about snagging "swing voters," the ones not allied to one party or the other. The strategy for both parties is to use these television appearances on prime time to give the appearance of outwitting the other, a kind of verbal boxing match with referee. In American politics, aggression is the winning style. We get to listen to two politicians talk aggressively to each other to suggest to the audience they're in control. Daddy's home. It surely must gall the racist party to see Romney one-upped by the Kenyan-American on national tv. But I doubt they saw it that way.

It was a political experience I suspect everyone who heard it came out of the same as they went into it. Television noise, no dead air. A moment without noise on tv allows the viewer a moment to think, and somebody might think about turning it off. Once I turned it off in the car, I did not turn it back on in the house. I'd heard more than I wanted to hear. I just wanted to get a feel for the nature of their dance around the mental ring in an imitation boxing match. Right away I got it that Obama was trampling Romney, and continued to listen to hear him do it some more. Of course I prefer Obama, because I like having somebody for king of the world who has some intelligence. Obama, Clinton and Carter were the only presidents I've seen with intelligence I admired and felt good that the king of the world had a good mind for decision making. When we had Reagan we were saying this is the bottom for how ignorant a man can handle the white house. Then Bush2 showed us Reagan was not the bottom. Reagan's summing up of his administration at the end was: It could have been worse. W came along and proved him right. Romney is showing us W was not the bottom either. It can get worse. Karl Rove's purpose is to see to it.

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BAD TELEVISION FOR PRESIDENT

A few hours ago this interface was not working. Now it is. Thank you to whoever makes such adjustments.

I can't listen to the news without hearing some kind of comment about the so-called debate that happened on tv last Wednesday. I listened to about 5 minutes and turned it off. Obama was stammering and stuttering like it was his first time on tv and Romney, coached by Karl Rove strategies, played Reagan, sometimes even using Reagan's voice where he could. Romney wasn't saying anything, but gave the appearance of meaning by suspension of disbelief using references to Reagan's flippant attitude toward Carter. Though Reagan never said anything worth hearing, his "Where's the beef?" statement stole the show with a predictable theatrical device. He shot that educated liberal right down with the ignorance trump card. I'd been wondering what Karl Rove had up his sleeve with only a month left of the countdown. These things I know: Karl Rove does not lose; Karl Rove has no bottom to how low he's willing to go.

I felt for Curious George playing President, the man who lives every minute of his life in the cross-hairs of assassins. I know it's not right, but every time I see him, I see Curious George, the children's book. It is such a likeness I wonder if it had something to do with all the white middle-class twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings carried away in his run for presidency. They knew Curious George like I knew Howdy Doody. Would I be carried away like that if Ted Koppell were to run for president? I don't think so. Curious George was as familiar to them as Reagan was to Death Valley Days viewers in the Fifties, and movies I never wanted to see. He was down there with Burt Reynolds, Charlton Heston and Victor Mature. If a movie had him in it, that told me it was not worth the time it would take to watch it, and certainly not worth the ticket price, whatever it was, even a free pass.

I felt for Obama's experience with coached ignorance that night like I felt for Carter up against coached ignorance on international tv and radio. A tight-rope to walk. In the short time I heard Obama talking, I was ashamed of him, though not entirely. He knew he was up against Karl Rove. He knows Rove's strategic mind, has studied it. I could hear Rove laughing at Obama in my mind. I had to turn it off. Rove stumped him good. So far, Obama has countered Republicans by exposing the lies with facts. He'd do well to forget that strategy. Rove is coming at him stepping around Obama's reminder of lies. Yeah it's a lie, so what. He'll pull something else next time. These "debates" are already confessed to be about style only. Obama attempted to insert substance, but was shouted down by ignorance. That's what I hear when the news plays excerpts from the exchange. Why so curious? OK, so you got facts--nobody cares. Romney sounded to me like Faulkner's line, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. That's all I hear when he talks. I see now that Rove is using the "debates" for the home stretch strategy, go into the last turn high and swing low like a slingshot. It's all or nothing from here on. Obama better listen to Samuel L Jackson.


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STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

 

 

 



It's been this way throughout my lifetime listening to Republican-speak. It's been so absurd that their ability to do what they're told keeps me laughing with an attitude of derision, which I don't like to feel; although it is entertaining. Every election year we go through long months of hearing republican-speak, and year-round every year on the news. Misinformation with intent to deceive. When it's an individual person it's called lying. What a politician says is never what the individual says. They have staffs of writers and lawyers directing them. Herein lies the issue. The politicians have to be so careful in every word spoken it takes convolutions of sentences to spin meaning into anti-meaning and nonsense into truth. It's come to the place for me that I already know somebody is a republican before they tell me or I find out some other way. When somebody comes at me completely false in tone of voice and words spoken, or comes on with the false enthusiasm of a self-help guru, or brags about being a Christian, I know automatically. Key word: false. Though the word is never used except against the truth.  


It's not just politicians, either. It's government, how it works. It's religion. Our role is to be good soldiers, do what we're told, don't ask questions. Brings to mind someone I once knew who did CIA work. Some of what he said he did made me think about conscience, don't you have a conscience? You did THAT because you were TOLD to? Do you do everything you're told? Of course he had a mind of his own and a conscience. This was work. At work you do what you're told. Conscience and idealism are ok for them that want it, but not at work, and certainly not in government work. I've spent my entire working life avoiding any work connected with government and corporations. It's not possible in the absolute, because everything is connected in one way or another. When I had my "small business" of selling cds of mountain music, it was the corporate distributor, the corporate labels, corporate credit card operation, government tax laws and regulations.


I've always worked for individuals instead of corporations or government. I've not made much money, but don't want money bad enough to bind myself to government or corporate domination. A job that requires me to put aside conscience, I don't want. For one thing, there's no telling what kind of shit it will get me into, like killing the poor for being potential communists or terrorists or whatever. At the College of Charleston I was happy the school did not have big science laboratories and big sports programs. No government or corporate funding for research toward killing the poor in Vietnam (at the time). The school was too small to be of interest to the Bank or the Pentagon. Out of control. Like Patti Smith says, Outside of society!!! That's where I wanna be!!! I'd rather listen to Lenny Kaye's guitar than to militarists or religionists. Speaking of which, in the course of my lifetime in modern and post-modern America, the only thing I see of any real value in our society is rock n roll. Rock is rebellious because rock speaks truth. Kids talking to each other. Kids have a short fuse when they hear bullshit from another kid. They have to take it from adults, but not from other kids.


I found a wonderful intent of purpose quotation from Reagan's top CIA dog, William Casey, in 1981: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believes is false." Pretty concise statement of purpose. That was in the beginning of the Reagan Junta. Thirty years later the republicans have done a splendid job of bringing about the end of Democracy in America by way of the Reagan Revolution deceptions, like trickle down in republican-speak = vacuum up in practice. Take from the working people and give to the Bank. Now that "the people" are threatening the Bank with the Occupy protests the corporate press refuses to acknowledge (even NPR), I've an idea that when "our troops" come home, their idleness will be occupied rounding up protesters and guarding them in concentration camps. Republican legislation is taking us there in a hurry. Again, Gore Vidal comes to mind, "When the American people are unable to recognize stupid, we're out of business." And I think of WB Yeats, the center does not hold.


Centripetal force has been o'ertaken by centrifugal force. We have collectively no feeling anymore for community or neighbor. "Major Tom, this is ground control," has become the song of our time. Drifted so far from the shore there's no more communication, no more control from "the center," ground control. "Here am I floating in a tin can far above the world." Then there's the double-entendre, "Planet Earth is blue (depressed) and there's nothing I can do." It's easy for politicians to debunk science, because they appeal to people who will believe ANYTHING THEY ARE TOLD, the lower half of the population where natural intelligence is concerned. Ignorance has gone this far in its advance through the collective body of the American people like a spreading cancer. This cancer or dark cabal, whichever, is seriously threatening the rest of us, like the Nazi (right wing) takeover of Germany--the same cancer or dark cabal from within. Evidently the German people don't recognize stupid. The Japanese, another super-intelligent people, don't recognize stupid either. Both were bombed back to the Stone Age for their arrogance. Duh. Can anybody see where this is leading? When the republicans take absolute power, which they are on the very verge of doing, look out America.


In this lifetime I have watched step-by-step the rise of the dark cabal of the republican party, lock-stepping its way to idolatry with a void of a human being, Ronald Reagan ("the Alzheimer's President"), one of the Southern California / Arizona right wing maniacs, Charlton Heston one of them, Barry Goldwater another. These were the people Ayn Rand wrote her fantasies for. Since the 1950s these people have been fervent with the same zeal of Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston and Richard Nixon, McCarthyites that didn't die with Joe McCarthy, intent on keeping-the-niggers-down while exhibiting a passion for the exclusive power of wealth at the expense of everyone else. Decisions that concern us are made at country clubs without any consideration of us on the outside, except how to keep us uninformed. Misinformation is the key. Alas, it works predictably. Forrest Gump's mother was nobody's fool.  


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LIES AS PARTY LINE

      alexander liberman, omega


Anyone who can't help but see the world we live in (civilization) falling into chaos is laughing out loud this week at the republicans lining up behind junk science over rape now and women's reproductive organs as political agenda. Again. That's an automatic given. Junk science, absurdity and willful ignorance characterize the republican agenda every time. Every day on the news I think of what Gore Vidal said, "When the American people cannot recognize stupid, we're out of business." Half the voting population indicate over and over, every time a republican is elected, that we're out of business. Stupid is held up high as intelligence. When half the voting population votes republican, we're out of business. Not only does it go unnoticed that stupid has a negative value, who cares? Hearing the pols talking junk science as agenda this week reminds me of a statistic I found a year or so ago that only 10% of scientists are republican. They must be what's left of the pre-Reagan republicans unable to deny the scientific method.


Today I pulled into a parking spot next to a car with Virginia FoXX on the back bumper. I sighed a groan, willful ignorance out in the open. The woman attached to the car came to open the door and saw me, "HI TJ!" Eek, I thought, the second worst Reagan republican I know, the kind that makes my skin crawl the same way the two words der fuhrer make my skin crawl. Even worse, because this is the great American Democracy that Reagan republicans are systematically dismantling unto only the military left, police state. Enemies of the American people is what they are. That's the only way I can see it. Self-destruction is ultimately their preferred direction. OK by me, but why take all the rest of us with you? I appeal to the republicans to go ahead and self-destruct, get out of our world; please don't take us with you. Just go away. I fussed about inside the car, entering an address into the GPS device on the dash, focusing my attention on my new tech device. It's rude to interrupt somebody operating a new tech device. I waited for her to pull away before emerging from the safety of my mobile capsule. Phew.


I'm not like that with other people I know who are republicans. I can't help but see anyone who identifies himself/herself a post-Reagan republican as anything but a parrot. The republican party has become the same as the Baptist religion where you believe what you're told and don't think about it. Recite the verses---book, chapter and numbers to show you really understand. Polly wanna cracker, Ship ahoy! It's like to become a member you have to sign over whatever natural intelligence you might have to the Party Line. In the 1950s "Party Line" was reference to communist countries where they did the same thing; you talk party line to show your loyalty on the one hand and to stay out of trouble on the other. Now the republicans after half a century of McCarthyism have become what they hate. Same as the Baptists are becoming what they declare to hate. An ancient saying comes to mind: be careful what you hate because the hate draws it to you. Hate is a powerful attractive energy like love. This is my argument with my mother and her Baptist parrotry about me needing to focus more attention on Satan. I say, Go ahead, you do it for me. Lord have mercy.


The center doesn't hold any more. This, I suspect, is why people are clustering into hate groups everywhere, the republican party a half-the-population hate group, the people who say NO to the well-being of the working people and YES to the Wall St robber barons. I'm one of the working people who values the democracy republicans have been dismantling since Reagan's first day in office boasting he had a "mandate." 51% thanks to the cooperation of the Ayatollah bought with drug money from involvement in the Central American civil wars created by CIA. It has been increasing republican skulduggery, Kenneth Starr, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, low-down weasel attitudes toward life, worse and worse since Reagan, all referring back to Reagan, W declaring himself, "I'm the new Ronald Reagan." He was. It was the only truth I ever heard him speak. Maybe he thought it was a lie when he spoke it, but it came true. After Reagan, we said, It couldn't get worse. Then it did when the Reagan supreme court placed the loser in the winner's circle. The entire Reagan influence has come from the dark side, characterized by nothing but lies and deception, taking from the working people and giving to the Bank. It's what they do. What we do as human beings in this world defines our character. Lying and deception defines a character I want nothing to do with.


I don't have any problem with somebody lying from feeling threatened, which can be something like stealing food when you're down and out and hungry. As soon as I find somebody is one to lie all the time, I steer myself around them like a leaf floating on the surface of a creek's water flow around a rock and over a rock on its way to someplace else. In a lot of social interaction between people who don't know each other very well much lying will be going on, but it tends to be what I'm coming to think of as fantasy creation. Like driving a car that's just a little bit more expensive than you can afford. Like the identity of your life being the party you went to on Erroll Flynn's yacht when you looked good undressed. That kind of lie I'm cool with. It's something of a logjam when I think of all the directions continuous lies come to us from. It's to the point that now we have the internet which we collectively agree is not necessarily accurate information coming from anywhere. Sometimes it is, but we're never sure. It's the same with the serial fiction called the News. We're probably in pretty good collective agreement that the news is fiction. It's just another tv show, one with commercials for Cadillacs.


It's become fairly clear by now that this house of cards that is the international banking system in sync with the political systems based altogether in lies, in denial, in self-centered unregulated greed siphoning off the top and trickling down the crumbs from the table for the dogs. Kinda like in the French Revolution time, but this time it's all the Western World. The Red Dragon has been here and gone. Destruction is the nature of its wake. I hear a reggae song in my head by Burning Spear, Babylon will fall, repeated as the chorus. Babylon is falling. It has been falling since 1980. Republican agenda has been to advance the fall. Ralph Nader felt no guilt being instrumental in setting up the situation that gave the supreme court the opportunity to show it's true intent to destroy our democracy through the legal system.  He said, "The republicans will get us there first." There, being the total collapse from which we will have to pull ourselves together and set out on a constructive destination, because that negative republican destination took us to destruction. As Ronald Reagan promised he would do in his campaigning. It was a campaign promise he kept.


This and much more is why I am not a republican and have little tolerance for a Reagan republican. I know Babylon must fall and this is the time for it to fall. And Ralph Nader is right, the republicans are taking us there fastest. Like Nader, I'd rather see it sooner than later, while at the same time lament seeing the destruction of an intelligent form of government by massive ignorance. Der fuhrer destroyed Germany's government with ignorance. He was the same destructive energy as the dark cabal the republican party has aligned itself with. The fall is inevitable, it is prophesied, it is process of transition from one level of consciousness, getting the old one out of the way in the past like tearing down a building in a city to put up a new building. The old way doesn't work any more. It has calcified subject to human ignorance for about as long as a government can last in this time. A couple hundred years (1776 - 1980) for an attempt at democracy that got about as near to the ideal as the Soviets came to the communist ideal. I know that the Reagan republicans are doing us a favor tearing down the old democracy as it has to get out of the way for what is next. If the republicans have their way, it will be a formalization of the police state we already have. This is why zealous Reagan republicans give me the creeps. I know it is time for the destruction, but still I don't like watching it unfold. I should thank them, but I can't. I'm not that advanced.   


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