Deaf, Blind and Soulless

No matter how many times we change our representation and exercise our rights as voters the ruling elite in Washington DC ignore voter demands and stifle all change. No matter how clear we state our grievance, that the system as it stands dooms the people to economic hardship, Congress and the White House refuse to seriously address the problem, and business continues as though nothing at all has transpired. When will our so-called leaders get the message, from all of us, that change is not about rhetoric, it's about action? This year? Right after the next election? That sounds so familiar. One must wonder about the holdup, and not just the holdup in which the wealthiest portion of our country took money from the rest of us to stay at the top.

When will elections stop being contests to see who can most magnificently deceive the voters into believing action will be taken and start being milestones of reform? The answer could be revealed to be never and it would surprise so few. What percentage of struggling voters does it take for the struggle to become the number one issue and not a statistic at the end of a pointer? 50 percent? 65%? Does the term "all of us" mean anything to politicians, or have they become so blinded by power that words have lost all meaning? All equates to "in totality," but that would be technically incorrect, as there is that little percentage that owns almost everything.

Most politicians aren't even part of the 1%. Some are like pets of the obscenely rich. When it gets cold outside the fat cats can yawn at the windows, at us, as we clamor to be let into the system that is now based on exclusion and predation rather than inclusion and benefaction. If they start to become self aware, corporate headquarters can always dispense tasty treats and scratch their backs. Meanwhile, we might as well fall for the trick where the door is held open briefly but is only a trap. Sometimes we get hit on top of the head with an anvil, other times a skillet hidden in the snow brains the hasty.

Wait! There's a telegram! It's from Acme! It says, "You're too late to duck." Boof! A sledgehammer to the solar plexus just knocked the wind out of somebody. When will we ever learn? If only it was as easy to recover in real life as it is in the cartoons. In real life we freeze to death in the cold. The safe bet is those protests will end soon. It gets cold outside, without homes, without jobs. without real hope. Actually, it gets cold anyway, but you get my drift.

On the Plutocracy Panic

In his New York Times op/ed Paul Krugman detailed the whining and the screeching of the GOP political elite as they flail about knowing that Occupy Wall Street has got their number. He pointed out one of the funnier reactions:

My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

It's only funny if one suspends for a moment the knowledge that Senator Paul is serious. Rand Paul likely does believe that the protesters may commence physical assaults, or robbery, as he is describing, and humor does not mesh with that notion.

Pretending, for a moment, that Senator Paul made his remarks out of a sense of good sportsmanship, then let us by all means play along. It's time to seize iPads. For poor people those devices aren't as useful as knee pads, but since we wouldn't be getting elbow pads at the same time anyway, to greatly lessen the discomfort of taking it from the wealthy on all fours, we might as well settle for the Apple gadgets. Some of us have no use for knee pads alone, anyway. Those of us who don't lend our mouths to the whims of the 1% for the sake of lining our pockets won't be able to stop the reaming, but we sure as hell don't have to be on our knees. We are forced to bend to pick our lives up from the dirt every time the top tier reaps too many digits of capital from derivatives, but we aren't obliged to pay lip service to the lofty aristocrats who bought representatives of the people body and soul. We owe no obeisance.

Senator Rand Paul should probably guard against the watchful eye of real conscience instead of feigning concern for items he likely doesn't even use. Every moment Eric Cantor barks complaints about all the complaints, another moment that could have been spent drafting real compromise and real solutions has passed by and disappeared. His party's warfare against civil liberties, common sense and decency in government obligations has been far more like true combat than the last ditch effort of everyday folk to save the dying American dream.

There can be no class warfare against the 1% at the top. Not only aren't there enough of them to count as a class, but there is no way to wage such a struggle. The infinitely privileged have purchased all the seats to the event, and the chairs sit empty. They have written all the rules requisite for participation, and refuse to even let them be read. They put a fence around the battlefield, and unless you're THIS tall you can't even get in. The warfare was over before it became a concept.

Krugman has a keen way of stating the painfully obvious. It would be a great Christmas present to wake up one year and find a piece by Krugman that lights up the room and the reader's thoughts. What a present if Krugman focused on the unbearable surplus of jobs, the overflowing ranks of the middle class, the staggering optimism of the masses and the undying spirit of friendship between the wealthy and the wealthier in this nation, and the other three people about to be empowered enough to reach that state as well. I can dream. I have hope, and it's not something from a speech. Of course I'm not stupid either, I just like to believe we as a people can pull off the impossible, if we 100% set our minds to it.

A Ported Portion a'Sunday

Coming Soon

Chapter 17: Smudge on a Clean Slate

October 12, 2011

• NY Times article pointed out by Matthew Yglesias says that the Pearson Foundation has been funding international trips for education commissioners for what they call strictly educational purposes - to give the commissioners ideas for improving their schools from schooling models in other countries. The Pearson Foundation may have a generous streak a mile wide in its charter, but they surely want to sell books. At the very least they are counting on the recipients of their good will to drum up positive word of mouth for their company. It's a shame that the microscope for this sort of practice has to be on an educational company considering the vast world of lobbying sleaze out there. Possible that Pearson Foundation's travel agent got scooped by one of their competitors- En garde! Have at thee with this negative publicity!
  
  
• The largest European hacker club, the Chaos Computer Club, claims to have discovered and analyzed a piece of malware written and used by German police. It's the typical Big Brother program for a totally invasive breach of privacy. The German government spyware intercepts data used on Internet telephony. It has no protections against being hijacked however, and can easily be used by a third party to have it do whatever they like: turn on and use webcams, or connected microphones, and easily capture screenshots of browsing and emails. German officials voiced denial. They couldn't be proud that not only does the malware have morally and legally corrupt implications, it's a shoddy piece of work as well, since anyone can use it
  
  
• Not long ago Ars Technica ran a story enunciating a heap of very bad things about RSS, but the specifics weren't quite as large as the story. At the end the biggest definite negative was that RSS interrupts normal work flow. Updating feeds draw your attention away from a task at hand, and it can take up to fifteen minutes to fully resume the interrupted state of complete attentiveness. There was a brief section concerning the feeling that one is shirking work when confronted with the number of unread items at the top of an RSS reader, a number which never, ever goes down at any rate even close to the speed at which it goes up. The sense of an unmet obligation nags at the edges of one's awareness, and that can cause a slowdown in normal productivity.
  
  Speaking of RSS, the front page link to Ars' RSS feeds is broken right now, which is why this story emerged here. This while Ars tries to sell personalized RSS feeds. 2011. Personalized RSS feed. 2D dating. Anti-depressant sales up. Topics relative to each other.
  
  
• Right wing conservative talk about the end of the era of constant scientific progress means little as the progress rolls on. New chips: 20 times faster than DDR2, less volatile due to decreased electrical demand, more stable than NAND flash memory. Out soon.
  
  Mozilla Firefox will be updated silently. Users will have to understand that consent for update is given when they begin using Firefox. User input actually drove the decision. People have wearied of constant update announcements regarding their browser. The move to silent upgrades won't happen until 2012.

Newsflash: Science Has Failed

• Andrew Sullivan pays homage to some opinions found in the National Review Online, a piece written by Peter Thiel. Thiel hypothesizes that technological breakthroughs have come to an end and that our economic outlook has shifted accordingly. Facts have muffled the pomp and circumstance surrounding a move to green technology. The glorification of solar energy, environmentally friendly solutions to energy problems and all things green is a portrait of loss. The movement has failed. Futuristic agriculture isn't solving hunger. According to Thiel we have reached the end of progress and buzz now surrounds negative news rather than a slowdown in positive news. Economic news has returned to strictly economic trends as scientific discussion fades into obscurity.
  
  "National Review Online" article, negativity, overweight Fertile Crescent descended marginally taboo sexual deviant - all factors that point to a yawn inducing Sunday afternoon non-news event. The Luddites in the GOP got an early Christmas present. It's an article saying their dreams have come true, that the development of new technology has ceased. Never mind Thiel created the story just to be contrary. Scientists, programmers, engineers and businessmen have never been hotter to make breakthroughs happen than they are right now, which is a constant state of deep seated yearning to make history and have a name that lives forever. Thiel, however, should be commended for bringing peace to some troubled oldsters afraid of a mandatory conversion kit that would sodomize their Studebakers, having them run on squeezed out Church's chicken napkins instead of good old fashioned liver friendly gasoline (gasoline is just for drinkin' now that cars run on stove drippings!).
  
  I wrote what follows, but I respect Andrew Sullivan immensely. His posting of the material without a countering argument got on my nerves. This ad hominem response was uncalled for, and not my style.

  Andrew Sullivan probably wanted to share a story about how long he gazed wistfully at a picture of Peter Thiel wearing a baby blue polyester sport coat in a speaking engagement for The League of Thermodynamics Deniers. It's difficult for Sullivan to be honest on a normal human level, however, so he brought us the uplifting words that our forward motion as a scientific culture has halted. So we are to go back to basket weaving in between gathering berries for the life prolonging paste our women will pound out. Hey, at least it wasn't Sullivan's NRO article.

• The Value Voters Summit straw poll contained an error in one of the multiple choice questions. The question asked which issue was the most important to the voter in deciding who to support. One of the answers was "Protecting one man one women marriage." Rick Perry gained the assistance of Robert Jeffress in spotlighting Mitt Romney's cultist religious beliefs, that church physically linked to the Utah badlands and canyon country and forever associated with polygamy in the minds of any who have learned about the sect. "One man one women marriage:" Legalizing polygamy once again could be part of a hidden agenda at Mitt Romney headquarters, where jealousy fans the flames of anti-Chinese sentiment. Romney: "So many Chinese women, so only one marriage, so not available."
  
  
  
  

Saturday Cross Over

• Emerging Saturday theme: "This is not what it is."
  Alexandra Petrie refers to Occupy Wall Street protesters as these people, criticizes everything she can, refers to them as "us" and "we." She attempts to ride the coattails of the movement for any success she can get while at the same time demonstrating the incredible wit with which she can dispatch the ignorance of the protesters to futility.
  Her column picks at every dangling thread of Occupy Wall Street using language that pretends she empathizes, or is even a part of the movement, Ms. Petrie, how hip art thou?
  
  In Mitt Romney's campaign platform dealing with foreign affairs, the plan proposed with regard to China is not to build an anti-Chinese coalition, but rather "to strengthen cooperation among countries with which we share a concern about" that country. As Daniel Larison points out, Romney proposes to do all the same things as Obama with less tact and more antagonistically. It's not anti-Chinese, it's pro-weapons buildup, to be used against China, in case.
  
  Laura Ingraham refers to herself as being together with the rest of us "who yearned for history" in the election of a black man to the presidency. Right after that she goes on to discuss how Herman Cain would really be the first black President, because Obama is mixed race. Ms. Ingraham has worked out the race thing for everyone, and we should be thankful. We might have thought Barack Obama was a black man if it weren't for her. What a classy dame.
  
  These re the things that are what they are, not that aren't what they are, even if the author tells us that they are most definitely not what they are. Then there are industry shills masquerading as pundits who don't even bother to pretend they aren't what they are. Neil Stevens speaks out against Net Neutrality without any backing argument. He should have just said, "I'm against everything I am paid to be against. Down with the FCC and the law, especially Net Neutrality, because.. down with Net Neutrality!" Here's a gem, however: Obama himself is manipulating numbers on behalf of the FCC in order to steal from normal Americans. I knew it!
  
  Dishonesty is beginning to ramp up. Attacks lacking context but long on criticism are on the uptick. It's a big election year coming. For many of these writers the facts aren't nearly as important as influence. But don't ask them. They'll answer that the facts are not what they "look more like." How does one do look more like? It doesn't make sense, correct? Neither do a lot of Republican statements as of late.
  
  
• Encountered graphs and charts showing just how royally we, the 99% of the people who own the tiniest fraction of wealth, have been getting screwed for decades. It would be easy to cart them over here with a little of the old copypasta action, and that may still happen later. For now here's a link to the very depressing numbers and the glaring reality of how the wealthy have been sticking it to us.

I've forgotten to port from Symbols a few times. Gotta work on that.

Slowww

"I hired Sarah Palin because she was hot and got ratings." No, that quote has nothing to do with Senator John McCain, but anyone who knows their civics would already know that. In McCain's case it was why she was chosen. The quote is from Roger Ailes, Fox News Chairman, who actually hired her.

Regardless of what one may think about the former Alaska Governor. she understands money. She understands that money is something she receives for saying things and looking good. Considering what she has to say, looking good has more to do with the money than the quality of her opinions. One can only wonder if contemplation of the aging process and its detrimental effects on appearance worries Mrs. Palin. I won't tell her about it if you don't. [2:48 P.M.]

Senator Jeff Merkley on attending an Occupy Wall Street protest in Portland: "It's worth exploring." They aren't all bad. Still, don't expect to see him.

Weigh-in: Neo-Feudalism, Baby Factory X

• Members of the U.S. House of Representatives Republican Goon Squad have locked Title X in their crosshairs and desire to slash funding for federal family planning grants that include birth control and preventive health care. A typical Title X patient costs about $257 a year; a birth averages $12,613. The Catholic and ultra-conservative line on birth control is that it should never be used. House Republicans can deny that religious beliefs have anything to do with their intentions, and instead can shake their fists at an imaginary leviathan government they insist needs to be smaller and less functional. To recap, in order to save money the GOP thinks patients should get pregnant and hand the country $3.4 billion a year in costs instead of having family planning for a fraction of the cost. Like everything else from the Party of No, it makes perfect sense to drunkards and Alzheimer's victims in the severe stages (so beloved because of dearly departed Great Leader, Bedtime for Bonzo's Reagan, The Man). - 6:30 P.M.
  
  [Here's to adult abstinence among single couples - a dinosaur belief. How will the woman get the man married if she puts out early? Do you want your daughter single and sexually active? Some of you understand this... This is failed humor, and in poor taste at that. Some of us feel that way about the old fashioned beliefs described - no sex until marriage. Some of us are offended that they are old fashioned now. The thing is, the religious subjugation of women has been a minority practice my entire life, in my little part of the world.
  
  Since I threw up this waste of space Mitt Romney checked with a woman's husband to see if it was okay to put his arm around her -- same school of belief. A woman is less than a free individual in the conservative religious world. A married woman belongs to her husband. Daughters reach adulthood and escape parental ownership, but never lose dad's guardianship. This is a non-issue, thankfully, so there's nothing to defuse or continue explaining.]
  
  
• By far one urgent complaint among working class people here in the United States involves the evaporation of the middle class. In places like Norfolk-Virginia Beach, so desirable a place to live to so many, six and seven day work weeks are common. The critical problem is that generations of workers do not have anything left over after rent, utilities, transportation expenses and food. Many men and women are faced with either working without earning any long term gains of any kind, or leaving the place where they live in favor of a location where rent and other costs are significantly cheaper.
  
  The situation in modern America in many ways resembles a very real neo-feudalism ruled by corporations. Families are separated due to inescapable economic facts. The working class spends a large portion of their lives as slaves due to numbers that have been shrunk down until they fit individuals like a glove: One person can survive on this dollar figure, therefore they equal this number in value. Included in that survival... survival only. Proactive wellness and stability only exist for those people lucky enough to live in the economic tiers above workaday.
  
  
• From the arena of ideas surrounding Occupy Wall Street a member of the Daily Kos community voiced that which is required to stop the nation's unemployment crisis: A massive government jobs program with a $5 trillion dollar budget. That could first be seen at the link as part of a graphic that addresses specifics in providing populist solutions regarding Wall Street and the out of control profiteering in the finance industry. Also on tap - instead of even contemplating a return to the already inadequate Glass-Steagall style regulations, nationalize the banking industry and entirely eliminate earnings from speculation on subprime mortgages and the high risk credit industry.
  
  Pensador continued to call for prosecution of the people who walked away with millions and tens of millions of dollars during the government bailout, and further back. There was a nod to shutting down the incessant broken record calling for public austerity measures that real people do not actually want. It's too bad Occupy Wall Street did not write something similar to what this Kossack did and then release that, instead of the statement that did come out.