Democrat Derangement Syndrome

Buncha Rich Fuckin' Sociopaths Sittin' Around Talkin' - Howard Lutnick on the All In podcast

"What I've learned at the Federal Reserve is a new language which is called 'Fed-speak'. You soon learn to mumble with great incoherence."  -- Alan Greenspan

As a rule, Democrats suck.*  No question about it.  Once the party of  Franklin Roosevelt, whose bold leadership out of the Great Depression 100 years ago set the stage for an era of reforming presidents of both parties and America's greatest period of prosperity and expanding equality, it is now the party of Third Way donor-fellating technocrats whose wannabe Republicanism-Lite™ in a dark, seemingly unending era of raging inequality and misery is popular only amongst themselves, Never Trumper Republicans and certain 24 hour news channels.  Their heads-up-their-asses approach to politics bears great responsibility for where we have found ourselves in 2025.  Happy?  Now can we talk?

I was watching a segment on Status Coup the other day in which it was promised that Jordan (Chariton) , the founder and main presenter of the Left of Progressive news outlet "GOES NUCLEAR on SLEAZEBALL Trumper Hinting at Sabotaging Social Security".  The occasion for it was remarks that Trump's Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick made on the Venture Capitalism podcast All-In concerning his lack of concern about the controlled chaos inflicted on the Social Security Administration by Elon Musk's DOGE coup:

Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month, my mother-in-law — who's 94 — she wouldn't call and complain.  She'd just think something I messed up and she’d get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.

Never mind that the Trump administration is busily removing the channels for said complaining by cutting out the SSA's customer service phone number entirely as they prepare to make AI bots the only public face of the Agency.  Do we really have to say that by definition those who need Social Security the most-- for whom the program was conceived as a way of keeping the elderly and unable to work off the streets and able to keep food in the larders as the name implies-- are those who can least afford to miss a single payment?  Chariton did not disappoint, removing his trademark nerd glasses to accurately proclaim Lutnick a "rich fucking sociopath."   Chariton's assessment of the plan that Lutnick was purposely under-representing for his former Wall Street cronies sounds about right: "Pretty clear cut: let's just fuck up this program as much as we can, get the masses so disgruntled, so desperate, and then, hey!  Maybe J.P. Morgan can help us with Social Security.  Maybe McKinsey... the vulture capitalist consultants that Pete Buttigieg [worked for], maybe the private sector can do this better than us since we've fucking taken a chainsaw to it. And that's before they start cutting the benefits-- and I assure you that's coming too-- under waste, fraud and abuse."  All of this in spite of Trump's repeated promise on the campaign trail (to a MAGA constituency that is assuredly heavily dependent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as Chariton reminded us) that his administration was not going to touch the entitlements.

Of course no Status Coup rant would be complete without a reminder that the Democrats are hardly better.  Chariton reminded us of the tinkering and the threats to tinker with Social Security of the most recent crop of Democratic presidents.  But there was no mention of the inconvenient fact that the most recent, Joe Biden, who as a Senator pioneered third wave Democratic advocacy for ruthless "serious" trimming of entitlements in the name of deficit reduction, seemingly found Jesus as president on Social Security by boosting payments to the Social Security Trust Fund out of which come monies that cover  annual shortfalls between the amount paid into Social Security by those still in the labor force and those paid out to retirees and those on disability, which in 2023 was $41.4 Billion.  The total amount in the Trust Fund is around $2.8 trillion dollars, enough to cover shortfalls of similar magnitude until 2035.  To complete the picture, the money that goes into Social Security via employer's FICA payments on behalf of their employees is a progressive tax on worker's wages which is capped at incomes of $168,600.  Above this, the tax is the same regardless of the income of the contributor: currently $20.9K per year.  Should the Trust Fund deplete, based on annual contributions, Social Security will still pay 85% of benefits; however, as Bernie Sanders has been touring the country pointing out, the shortfall could more easily be filled by removing the cap on incomes for social security contributions.  "Tax the rich"

The Sociopath Lutnick, a former Democratic donor-type skeeve pre-Obama who oozed his skeeviness rightward over supposed unhappiness with Democratic identity politics during the previous Trump admnistration and provided resources for Trump's latest win, epitomizes the counterpart trajectory to Status Coup's guest in the segment, Steve Grumbine, a former Reagan Republican whose exposure to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) supposedly turned him into a progressive; a "Real Progressive" as the non-profit that he founded of that name avers.

Grumbine comes in hot following Chariton's rant to talk about how Bernie saying all we have to do to cover the Social Security shortfall is tax the wealthy is basically feeding into the same message as Lutnick et al—i.e., that there’s a shortfall that needs to be dealt with (contra Bernie by cutting benefits)-- when according to Modern Monetary Theory the government can just print money whenever it wants to, so Social Security is never in true jeopardy, shortfall or not.  In support of Grumbine's assertion, Chariton plays a clip of Alan Greenspan, the libertarian, partisan, Randian, antiregulatory free-market fundamentalist and former Head of the Federal Reserve from the Reagan to Bush Younger administrations (and as administrator of monetary policy arguably the engineer of the 2008 Financial Crisis due to policies that made unregulated exotic speculation consequenceless for the financial masters of the universe).  Responding to questions from Paul Ryan in a congressional hearing about the shortfall, Greenspan, hardly a proponent of MMT, nevertheless magically parrots Grumbine's assertion that it’s not a question of will the money be there because the government can print money whenever it needs to, but rather “the question is, how do you set up a system which assures that the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purchase?  So it’s not a question of security, it’s a question of the structure of a financial system which assures that the real resources are created for retirement as distinct from the cash.  The cash itself is nice to have but it’s got to be in the context of the real resources being created at the time those benefits are paid “ (video cuts off here.)  All of which Chariton interprets as there is no insolvency issue, we have enough money to pay out social security "into infinity and beyond."  And Grumbine goes further to explain the gobbledygook from Greenspan about what the real question is as consistent with MMT's advocacy of deficit spending;  and avers that the Social Security system as conceived and currently operating is a concession to capitalists in that above a certain income you pay the same as everyone else so it hurts less to pay the more you make over that cap , whereas at the bottom of the scale it’s taking a bite out of your ability to live day to day.  So while Greenspan is matter of factly saying that the real problem of retirement is not coming up with the cash to pay Social Security, it’s coming up with the things that that cash buys—in other words a problem for business—Grumbine is saying the government could not tax anybody for Social Security—and it could still then turn around and pay everyone say $5000 a month regardless of how much you made over the course of your career and then the problem would be ensuring that there were enough resources for folks to spend that money on. 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Trump administration is not about to fix Social Security with Modern Monetary Theory, and furthermore that in the only alternate universe that was possible in the November branch of alternate universes, a Kamala Harris administration would not be dismantling social benefits, laying off Federal employees, wrecking government to give cover to nefarious plans to privatize to Elon Musk every service the government provides with our taxes.  If the Social Security Trust Fund is essentially a spreadsheet as Grumbine says, is it not reasonable to expect that anyone trying to preserve Social Security and prevent the massive social misery we appear to be headed for in this country might as well wring digits to "save" it from the hoarded wealth of billionaires?  Would anyone other than the less than 2000 billionaires in this country complain?  It is far too late to carp on this, but the reflexive "Them Too-ing" of Democrats on the part of the "enlightened left" absolutely contributed to the havoc we are now experiencing, which will only get worse.   We can certainly expect the abstainers of the left, the Third Party purity voters to continue moaning as a way of excusing themselves for shirking from the prevention of Trump's victory.  It certainly will not fix things if any proportion of them suddenly saw the light.  But I wouldn't mind.  

~~~~~

* Though there are exceptions.  And, to my main argument, far more exceptions to the rule in the Democratic caucus than in the GOP.

This is America

Arguably also #2

Trump has revoked the legal status of half a million immigrants from Venezuela, Cuba,  Haiti and Nicaragua who were granted permission to migrate under the auspices of  a sponsorship program introduced by the Biden administration in 2022 as a pathway to citizenship for those seeking asylum from acknowledged crises.  Beneficiaries of the program have been encouraged to self-deport and are  "required" to download a governmental app to inform the administration of their intent to do so.  And there are hints that Ukrainians are next.  Trump's administration is persecuting and seeking to deport or otherwise disappear legal citizens (Mahmoud Khalil most famously) whose opinions they don't like, and have used the pretext of the 1798 Alien Enemies act to round up non-criminal Venezuelans (men and women) for deportation and imprisonment in El Salvador which has agreed to take them-- the act's first invocation by a sitting administration ever in peacetime.  They have also sought to loosen prohibitions on torture and the use of black sites for those designated as enemy combatants, with an ambition to outdo the illegal activities of the Bush administration that at least had the context of the Iraq War to use as a cover for their thuggery.  And without yet waging war they are dropping bombs and killing civilians in Yemen (and coordinating the attacks via IM threads on private 3rd party apps that they accidentally share with journalists).  They are dismantling the Department of Education, cancelling foreign and domestic aid, antagonizing neighbors, infiltrating cultural institutions, hacking the few benefits American workers and taxpayers get from paying taxes and now have their sights on Social Security, Amtrak and the Post Office.

Some have wishfully called the unparalleled fascism that the Trump administration has unleashed on the country in its first two months following the playbook of the supremacist Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 Un-American.  The sad fact is that it could not be more American if it came with baseball cards and apple pie.  The country that brought you chattel slavery, Jim Crow, colonial settler genocide, trickle down economics, global anti-democratic mayhem in the name of the corporate class, planetary imbalance-- an acknowledged inspiration for both Hitler and settler colonial genocidal zionists in Israel-- now brings you Trump.  The empty protestations of impotent Democrats like Biden and Obama to the contrary, Violence and Stupidity is who we are. There is a certain class of lout that America has attracted and exalted and produced in abundance over the years, and comb-over Trump and his implanted South African partner in crime with implants Elon Musk are the apotheosis.

I know this is not what those who invoke American ideals in contrast to what we're witnessing from Washington are talking about when they use the phrase un-American to describe what Trump and Musk and their evil minions are doing.  True enough, there is a strain in American culture, a never realized but often invoked strain, that hints at government of, for and by the people.  A land of the free, a home of the brave and just and good.  Simple folk who believe in doing for yourself and letting your neighbor be but taking care of folks when times is tough or they ain't got the wherewithal to take keer of theirselves.  We don't go in for this here authoritarian stuff, least wise from those we send to Washington.  Shucks, we don't know much about book learning and such, but we'd never think of putting down folks who do.  We're not the kind to shy away from facing the cold hard facts of life if it's what we've got to do to make the world safe and life good for all good people everywhere.  Sure, we have differences, but we don't let them come between us, and we'll fight for your right to disagree with us about anything as long as you're not hurting no one with it.  Why, it takes all kinds to make the world go 'round.   There's plenty of room for everybody!  Burning books and jailing folks for having opinions contrary to our own and blaming people who don't look like us or act like us or believe like us for our problems is for fraidy cats.  That's not us!  That's not who we are!  Right, Neighbor?

Yes and No.

No Daylight, Kid

Trump they wouldn't believe.  Harris they wouldn't disbelieve.  But while Trump has already demonstrated his capacity to do the damage to our society that his most ardent and deeply pocketed supporters said he was going to do, we have recently learned that there was a good explanation for Harris's troubling remonstrations about how different a Harris administration would be from the Biden era that no one was particularly crushed to see about to come to an end.

As reported in the upcoming chronicle of the 2024 election, “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, as excerpted at The Hill:

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both understood the importance of being seen as the bigger change agent.  For Trump, that meant continuing to promise an antidote to the Biden-Harris years.  For Harris, there was more flexibility to define her brand of change.  ... [Biden] would say publicly that Harris should do what she must to win. But privately, including in conversations with her, he repeated an admonition: let there be no daylight between us. “No daylight” was the phrase he had used as a vice presidential candidate in 2008 to bind Republican nominee John McCain to an unpopular president, George W. Bush.

The day before Harris’s first interview ... [V]eteran Democratic communications strategist Stephanie Cutter launched into a proposed preamble — a list of all the items that made Harris proud of her work with Biden.  “Wait, wait, wait!” said Sean Clegg, a longtime Harris adviser who was regarded with suspicion by the Biden holdovers running the campaign. “Let’s not do this. Let’s not go down memory lane.”   That was the last time he was invited to media prep. 

Whether she won or lost the election, he thought, she would only harm him by publicly distancing herself from him — especially during a debate that would be watched by millions of Americans. To the extent that she wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so. He needed just three words to convey how much all of that mattered to him.  “No daylight, kid,” Biden said.

Nothing about this surprises me.  In fact, this was my assumption -- my hope-- going into election day-- that Harris's mannered insistence that nothing would fundamentally change except the face at the top of the ticket was not the truth but a condition of Joe Biden's surrender to the tide that burned to replace him only after it was too late.  It beggared belief that Kamala Harris was Joe Biden's DEI clone.  There was so much to object to about Joe Biden, apart from his deteriorating mind, that the sheer fact of a switch at the top of the ticket practically screamed relief from the collision course that the geezer rematch was guaranteeing us to be heading for.  By the point at which Joe Biden was nudged aside, the election seemed destined for the worst possible by far of two abysmal outcomes.  Of course Kamala Harris represented a fresh start.  I will confess I could not be dissuaded from my optimism about what a Harris win would mean, especially in light of the alternative.  Not even by Harris herself.  And my solitude at the end of the branch of suspended disbelief in the lack of daylight between Harris and the president who reportedly-- his self-serving ministrations about minimizing daylight between them notwithstanding--kept his vice president at arms' length  set the foundation for an especially steep fall and crash when the polls closed.

Is there a lesson in this? 

Yes, both for candidates who want to win and for those who vote as an act of  seeking power for their cause within a very confining charade of democracy, but is it now too late to learn it?

On Being Good

Sam Seder the host of the progressively disposed webcast Majority Report recently went on the Jubilee YouTube channel to participate in an event called Surrounded, in which according to some labyrinthine rules I did not hang around long enough to figure out, he sequentially debated a set of premises of his own construction with a series of conservative Gen Z fashion victims, all of whom in spite of the diverse mix of races, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations seemed united in opposition to Diversity Equity and Inclusion (and sometimes Accessibility) known colloquially as DEI.  DEI was itself one of the topics -- specifically "Trump's attacks on DEI hide his real goal which is to give corporations more power."-- which gave rise to the clip perhaps most widely shared in which a young latino gay gentleman with a man bun confidently asserts incorrectly that government agencies get tax breaks from the government for making DEI hires.  (Spoiler: Government agencies are not taxed by the government that creates and funds them from taxes.)   The young man's certitude and wrongness were  exceptional but emblematic of the caliber of opponent and quality of argument that Seder was up against.

Some of the combatants were better armed.  For instance debating  the proposition that "Unless you're a billionaire,  religious fundamentalist, or xenophobic nationalist, voting for Trump was a mistake.", Seder faced a young fundamentalist who had a point of view about the basis on which morality should be formed. His argument went along the lines of: 

If you don't have a foundation for your beliefs it's not morality, it's a preference.  A humanist foundation which seeks the least harm for the most people is considered consequentialist or utilitarian, not moral.  In that light, to a non fundamentalist, the belief that killing is wrong is merely a preference-- there's no basis for a difference with those who would say killing is right.  If society tomorrow said trans folks don't deserve rights, a moral relativist should be ok with that.  Take relativism to its logical end, however and you have low reproductive birth rates, a reproductive dead end (two men together can't reproduce). Religion prioritizes the nuclear family.   Gay people have no justification for being gay outside of "it just feels good".  Are pedophiles, like gay people, "born that way"?  To prevent them from acting on their urges we create duties.  Religion provides those duties and obligations to behave according to religious morality.  Life isn't about freedom and exercising what you want.  The leftist view  in contrast is only about "It makes me feel good."  

Seder admits that he was slow in cottoning to the argument being put before him, and for this reason feels this may be the one segment that he did not rise to.  (His argument amounted to: Religion having a number of differing viewpoints, no one of them should have the right to corner what god is telling us is right or wrong.   No one has a corner on religious truth.  The reason we have a democracy is because we don't want a king.  Kings came from the idea that their authority comes directly from god.)  Seder ultimately condeded  (to the extent that you can consider  a point that is utterly consistent with the premise being debated a concession) that religious fundamentalism won with Trump.  To which the fundamentalist boasted:  Sorry we're going to have more kids, less abortion, more families, stable family households, better education.  If liberal rights were rolled back, Gay people should be straight anyway.  Women should submit to their husbands. It doesn't mean they're slaves (which has become a bad thing  since the end of the civil war apparently, even to rightwing American Christian fundamentalists).  Seder: I don't want to live under a theocracy,  you on the other hand are at home in the Trump universe.  To which the young fundamentalist could only beam.

I don't want to debate necessarily, but for lack of a better idea, I am a little inspired to try to amplify why what is good for fundamentalists only, and particularly American conservative Christian fundamentalists, is objectively less good-- much much much less good-- than what is good for me and I assume for Sam Seder.  Sam may have hit on this but if he did it was not in any of the segments I could stomach watching.  

The fundamentalist world view is too stunted and provincial to see this, but morality, even their own is a betrayal of preference.  For the fundamentalist, the preference is for dictated standards of behavior.  For whatever reason, the fundamentalist prefers to attribute morality to an authority, and particularly an authority that theoretically metes out consequences for misbehavior.  By and large, the fundamentalist adheres to this morality both in fear of consequences of being found to fall short of adherence to the morality and occasionally due to a shared preference for whatever the authority's perceived preference may be, but the fundamentalist always projects and models his behavior as though he strictly adheres to the morality.  When morality is dictated to you, it is hoped that you will adhere to it, but it is expected that you will broadcast the sincere desire for others-- specifically, those outside the fundamentalist tribe--to be forced to comply with it (which could arguably be the primary motivation of fundamentalists to adopt such a petty and unforgiving world view to begin with).  The preference is to avoid eternal consequences (or short-term social ones) of being discovered by God, or worse, by one's fellow fundamentalists to stray from the dictated code, but especially to be perceived as being faithful to it.  A flawed human being can aver that their morality is from God, but truthfully, their morality is at best a preference to be seen as being faithful to the morality of their God.

Disbelieving in the authority of a pretty distasteful tradition (and I'm speaking in particular of the experience I've had of the American conservative Christian Fundamentalist tradition), it would be immoral of me to "base" my "morality" on the authority of a "god" or even to pretend to respect a tradition so at odds with what I consider to be the rightest to the best of my ability way to behave in this one life I'm given (by parent humans).  For starters, it would be immoral of me to yield my moral sense (to pretend to feel any duty or obligation) to a racist, xenophobic, nationalist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, ageist, lookist, ableist, liberty-for-me-bondage-for-thee tribalist selfish asshole of a god.  But it isn't because of a hatred for the god (there is no such entity, thank the heavenly void) but rather a fundamental (pardon the pun) disagreement about the best way for people to behave toward each other and toward the planet we find ourselves on.   Sam Seder's opponent may have been "sorry" about the imposition of his extremely tiny stultified notion of morality on those who rue the victory of his kind in the last election.  If my morality ever wins, it would mean that his kind would have to suffer the agony of universal healthcare and social security for all at every age.  They would need to deal with a state that assists a woman in realizing whatever choice she makes of whether or not and when to reproduce, either through safe and legal abortion if the time is not right or in tools to raise her child when she feels the time is right.  They would have to cope with a society in which work is done as a communal project to meet the needs of everyone,  even the least capable of working, and not for the profit and benefit of a tiny self-selected elite. They would need to deal with a society that lives and lets live, loves and lets love, is and lets be however a person feels they need to be.  True, they might be prevented from ever attaining billions in wealth or dominion over planet raping corporations, but they could very well find consolation as thriving citizens of a world in which needs are met with such little resistance and to such an extent that poverty does not exist, crimes are rare, inequality is not a thing and the best things in life are free.   Never in the history of this capitalism enthralled society has such a morality prevailed, regardless of fundamentalist claims (and blames) to the contrary.  Some day void willing.

Pet Names

On a completely different topic, here’s an interesting bit from the OED:

Dog

I.1.a.

Old English–

A domesticated carnivorous mammal, Canis familiaris (or C. lupus familiaris), which typically has a long snout, an acute sense of smell, non-retractile claws, and a barking, howling, or whining voice*, widely kept as a pet or for hunting, herding livestock, guarding, or other utilitarian purposes.

Etymology: Origin unknown.

The word belongs to a set of words of uncertain or phonologically problematic etymology with a stem-final geminated g in Old English which is not due to West Germanic consonant gemination and therefore does not undergo assibilation. These words form both a morphological and a semantic group, as they are usually Old English weak masculine nouns and denote animals; compare FROG n.1, HOG n.1, PIG n.1, STAG n.1, Old English sugga (see HAYSUGGE n.), Old English wicga (see EARWIG n.), and perhaps TEG n.1 It has been suggested that these words show expressive gemination, perhaps due to their being originally hypocoristic forms. (For discussion see R. M. Hogg†‘Two Geminate Consonants in Old English’ in J. Anderson Lang. Form & Ling. Variation (1982) 187–202.) For some of the words, substratal influence has also been considered (compare PIG n.1). Because attestation of these words in Old English is generally rare and confined to glossaries and onomastic evidence (as in the case of DOG n.1), if they are attested at all, and also because there is often a better-attested synonym (in this case, HOUND n.1), it seems likely that the words were stylistically marked in Old English, i.e. considered non-literary or informal.

It never occurred to me that the origin of "dog" could be a mystery; furthermore, that it might be part of a morphological and semantic group with frog, hog, pig, stag, haysugge (hedge-sparrow), earwig and teg (second year sheep) among who knows how many others. Are these other -g ending critters in the same category?: bug, slug, nag  

The commonality seems to hinge on the non-literary or informal quality they share -- they appear to be less well attested than their counterparts "Hound", "Boar", "Buck", etc.  The terminal "g" that they have in common has a tendency to double in length (geminate) in other forms.  As the evidence for the origin of  words in this class is either scant or associated with proper names in the literature,  the suggestion is that the final g may have been a way of forming informal or pet names for the commonly encountered animals (hypocoristic means having to do with pet names).   If I'm understanding it correctly, the animal may have been a hound, but fondness for it inspired proto-English speakers to dispense with formalities and call it a "doggie" which we inherited as the common English name for it, right?  How cute!

What does it mean?  I don’t know, but it’s interesting, isn't it?  Mind blown for the day.  

~~~~

* "... whining voice..." Rather subjective, is it not?  Cat people, am I right?

† No pun intended?

Quibbles

Francis Bacon

The other day, out of curiosity, I was googling "2024 Vote Regret" and I found 2 vote regretters.  Both of them regretted their votes ...  for Kamala Harris!   To be fair one of the regretters was that jackass on ESPN Stephen A Smith I think his name is and he was basically being a contrary dick on Bill Maher.  The other was Charlamagne Tha God and he was retroactively regretting endorsing Kamala Harris as VP in 2020.  But my point is, there is really no satisfaction to be gotten from seeking regret from anyone who didn’t vote for Harris, because they don’t seem to exist.  There are a few Trump regretters by now to be sure.  But trying to get people to admit that had Harris won we would not be in the position we're in is something like saying the moon would be green if it had grass growing on it.  My conclusion—and I’m not talking about dyed in the wool democrats or dupes but about smart people whose primary goal was avoiding what we’ve got now—we’ll never get the credit we deserve or any gratification for having tried to make the worst outcome of the 2024 election not happen, no matter how hard we seek.  (The silver lining: the whole fucking shithole of a country appears about to be ready to come crashing down around us now.  And I hope it does.  And when we wrest the charred remains from the bloated motherfuckers who are engaged in destroying it for their own superfluous gain right now, let's do it right next time-- for all of us.)  (And Fuck Them!)

***

Black Pill by Elle Reeve presents up close journalism about the sorts of internet denizens that our government's (hence our) violator Elon Musk fancies himself to be-- the edgy troll.  Insightful and adventuresome-- I'll miss reading it when I'm done with it.  Specifically, it concludes things about free speech absolutism that have been on my mind quite a bit lately—namely that it mostly serves nazis and racists who laugh behind the backs of useful idiot free speech advocates on the left.  I don’t know what to do about it, and Elle Reeve hasn’t yet said what to do about it if she has an opinion about that.  It’s sort of a black pilled predicament that the ones whose odious speech is most tenderly catered to are the ones basically advocating for surrender to the racist and misogynist and fascist notions that already hold sway in why things suck.  Meanwhile speech and thought of the left is actively and openly being banned by those aggressively pushing the freedom to be fascist.  Speech has consequences.  It gets people killed.  It undoes centuries of struggle.  Discuss.

###

Talking to a friend in my age range who was laid off a couple of years ago and who, after a futile two year search for someone-- anyone-- willing to take a chance on hiring a 60-something job candidate in his field, is cresting on adopting a stance that he is now permanently involuntarily unemployed, I am definitely of the opinion that even a “good job” is taken out of necessity, not desire.  The work I’m trying to force myself to get back to (yet writing this instead)-- I wouldn’t do it if I wasn't afraid of starving myself and my family.  My friend is not happy about the lack of agency he feels he has in his economic life, but it does not escape either of our attention that he and I are both the age that people not too long ago used to retire at anyway and in spite of everything in this stingy culture that is sending him the contradictory message that his unemployability makes him less than human, being outside the proletariat truly has its perks.  I think my friend, being no longer an exploited value producer is in the natural state.  We’re trained to feel that the natural state is wrong.  But the natural state is the right state to be in if you can get there.  It’s just that the voices that encourage it are few and far between.  Society is set up to thwart the natural state.  Like almost everything about capitalism, the attitude of society to the natural state -- fear!-- is expressed as a lie.  We can’t bring ourselves to say we fear people living in a natural state because that way lies the end of capitalism.  Instead we say the natural state is deficient. Capitalism is deficient.

%%%

Privatization is not just an idea about how to reform the manner in which government provides service to its citizens.  It is the looting of our common treasury without our permission.  It is looting that makes the looting that Fox News is eager to warn us about when well-felt anger manifests itself among the people of the city after the latest outrage of indignity perpetrated on them by the constabulary look like mutual aid.  The object of privatization is to make the purview of government not the provision of a common good from the pool of our collective tribute, but rather to afford scoundrels who by hook or by crook find themselves "elected" to higher office  the opportunity to entitle their already bloated capitalistic patrons and cronies who got and keep them there to abscond with our treasury for their own profit, leaving them to see fit how poorly or even whether the once public now private service they have been gifted dominion over is delivered.  The beneficiaries of privatization are thieves twice over, for they steal not only our treasury-- the money that we who are not the beneficiaries of the wealth protection industry are coerced to supply for it for nothing in return-- but also the money that they then charge us for whatever it is our tax dollars have been granted them to retail or to rent to us. In spite of the clever sounding justifications that think tanks have been bribed to come up with, privatization is not "a cool thing to try", it is a crime committed by both the privatizers and the recipients of these corrupt officials' largesse with our money that should uniquely be punishable by public execution of both the privatizers and their profiteers.  Even murderers can be reformed.   Privatizers and their profiteers are irredeemable.  But seeing that they get their desserts (and we ours) is up to us.

Look closely- It's not an ad for a pickle.  It's dead-scalp Elon Musk.

Non-Alignment Pact

 Happy Valentine's Day from Pere Ubu!

Miss Universe

I know a panic is coming, but right now, today, what I am experiencing as I face the barrage of apocalyptic news coming out of Washington is a rather uneasy calm.  It's not as if I haven't had moments of rage of the kind that makes an elderly couch potato hope that it's not exceptional, but a milder form of what someone who actually does stuff might be feeling.  But maybe thanks to the clean conscience of one of the not nearly enough who actually voted to try to prevent the chaos we're experiencing, I am finding it easy to return to a state of composure about what we're facing. Perhaps it's a parasympathetic response-- the nervous system is shutting off pain to permit my psyche to assimilate and address the trauma.  I have no doubt that what we're witnessing is a coup-- the president has essentially greenlit a raid of the Federal government by his largest donor who happens to be the world's wealthiest person and an invasive citizen from South Africa by way of Canada, who also happens to have attracted through his business practices the unwanted attention of several of the Federal Agencies he and his teenaged minions have been given carte-blanche access to.  The question is why?  Why did the guy who just made a political comeback unleash the forces of his nation's destruction coming right out of the gate?  I can think of several possibilities.

First, Donald Trump is not a terribly well-formed individual.  He has average intelligence and capabilities but has been the beneficiary of outsized advantages and the sort of egregious parenting that fosters at least the outward appearance of baseless, limitless self-regard.  It's an entertaining show that has contributed enormously to his popular appeal.  How else do you explain how someone as fatally flawed, proudly uncurious, and intellectually and behaviorally stunted as he could again be entrusted with the reins of the most perilously consequential office on the planet  especially after he was roundly rejected after his first term?   Even if you believe (as I do) that a good portion of the explanation has to do with corruption, cheating, theft and malfeasance (to say nothing of an electorate under-concerned with the threat of exactly what we're seeing thanks to whatever sleight of hand distracted them on the day their votes were cast), you have to admit that whatever he has going for him has granted him the plausible appearance of legitimate incumbency.  I am saying that it would be reasonable to expect a normal person faced with the responsibility bestowed (a second time!) on this motherfucker would have some concern about the appearance of stewardship and care with the institutions of our shared democracy.  In short, this is happening because Donald Trump is a freak-- a sociopathic monster of privilege and ego who has no regard for history or for the feelings of others.

Second, and this follows from the first, is the question of what motivates a president who clearly gives not a single fuck about the government or the people he is president of.  My sense (and this is not entirely my original idea but I don't recall where I first heard hints of it), is that Donald Trump already got what he wanted.   After losing rather handily to Joe Biden in 2020 thanks in large part to his predictably poor handling of the COVID crisis that came out of nowhere and changed everything that election year,  Trump got what he wanted in November.  He won the election by popular vote.  Trump just wanted the title.  Miss Universe. 

All the more remarkable considering what a disastrous campaign he ran-- not a liability when the competition was the visibly deteriorating and unpopular Joe Biden but a real feat when Biden was replaced at the 11th hour by the eventual runner-up, Kamala Harris.   True, to make it work, Trump had to suppress some of the promises he made to the forces that kept his campaign funded.   He knew Project 2025 was not a winner with voters and so he feigned ignorance of it.  As a gift to Trump, instead of selling herself as a break from the present doldrums of both Biden and Trump, Harris opted to complete Biden's campaign as she found it and assert her intention for her administration to be what the people clearly did not want-- a continuation.  

Having sailed past the concerns of the majority of the voters of that day, Trump is now happy to let Elon be president-- make that happy to let Elon do the work.  What does he care what happens to the government or the people?  He doesn’t have to run again unless he feels like it.   He’s perfectly content handing his credentials, access and “responsibilities” to others as long as he gets to keep the crown.

And not go to jail.  

And maybe actually be a real billionaire.

How convenient for the agenda of the suddenly blossoming Nazism of the invasive South African and his adoptive party.  For the rest of us-- including the electorate that made it possible, absolved though they are for the poor quality of their choice by the political malpractice of the campaign of the opposition-- maybe not so much.

Hate to Say It

Around the election, I found myself needing a break from some of the many podcasts and YouTube channels I had previously been fortifying myself with against Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in particular.  I became specifically disenchanted with the effectively single-issue podcasts that endorsed third party presidential candidates and that had become combative toward those who expressed a difference of opinion about the wisdom of voting your conscience and essentially letting whoever was going to win win rather than acknowledging that there might be value for Gazans in harm mitigation given the two most likely (read: only possible) outcomes for this most intrusively relevant office.  Recently as the cold light of day has only gotten colder, I've felt myself warming a bit toward my favorite of those podcasts and have lately given it a somewhat wary second chance.  It was bound to happen-- on a third try, one of the co-hosts prefacing what promised to be a rant about Trump's designs on the real estate of Gaza, and his resumption of channeling 2000 lb bombs to Israel to abet in the deed (breaking Biden's too-late prohibition on transfer of the weapons after months of administrating a dutiful supply), confessed that he was much more comfortable criticizing Democrats than Republicans and this critique of Donald Trump was new territory for himself.  I suppose I could have held on to see his fledgling critique in action, but I confess, hearing out loud what sounded like the very confession I'd unconsciously sought of the hate-blindness of intelligent people to the vastly greater danger of a second Trump term over the prospect of a missed opportunity to punish Democrats for being Democrats consumed all of my emotion and I closed the video almost reflexively.  Truthfully, I share the hatred of the assholes who stole the Democratic party in the 80s and 90s and refuse to give it back.  But, the outburst that commanded my mouse clicking finger to close the video aside, for my own sanity in the face of a daily deluge of confirmation of just what I had feared, I have been trying to foster in myself a zen-like calm about the hysteria of the so, so many who urged whoever would listen away from voting for Kamala Harris now that they face Trump Part II with the rest of us. 

How could there be so much contention within the small sliver of the American electorate that otherwise knows best; how could there be such division within the same group of passionate deep-thinking people who would otherwise mutually want the same thing-- what the planet wants: an end to capitalism and a political system that is not controlled by money but by the native wisdom of the people? How could this one dumb day in November have made so many of them so stupid?

I made a chart:

I don't make resolutions, but last year I resolved to use fewer plastic bags.  Just in time, the county I live in outlawed plastic bags as of January 1, forcing me to keep my resolution.  Riding on that success, this year I made not a resolution, but a promise to myself following a year in which I could not shut up about the presidential election to write less about politics.  I felt good about its chances.   But I woke up yesterday morning with a pretty bleak notion about what we’re in store for and a sinking feeling that it's partly because so many people did not understand the choice that made our present predicament possible. 

I am almost afraid to infect another mind with my ominous horrific vision.  It had to do with who controls the food supply chain and who goes to jail if it suddenly becomes so scantily meted out that people begin starving in large numbers and only “the fittest” can manage to get their hands on it.  Some of those fittest might actually become a slave class in return for their fitness.  I had been thinking recently about AI replacing most jobs—the bullshit jobs in particular, like mine for instance.  AI would do the jobs that are such bullshit that they can stand being done by inert brains who will be replaced by AI in its present underwhelming state in which it's not so much good at knowing what it's talking about as it is good at sounding like it knows what it's talking about, which will be deemed good enough for most of the crap it will be needed for, like most of the bullshit jobs already are today.  That’s really as good as they need AI to be.  Thus, the workforce will be rendered into a pretty undifferentiated mass-- and a soon to be unemployed one.  

What if the ICE raids that have begun ravaging so many lives are designed to create a famine?  No one to pick the crops—only the very wealthy are assured meals.  The rest of us have to duke it out for whatever scraps make it at inflated prices to our grocery shelves.  What do they care?  It’s so much easier and faster starving people than rounding them up and destroying them. Many years ago, a former colleague of mine actually accidentally starved a couple dozen feral cats that had been living with her.  It took only a handful of days.  She didn’t mean to.  She lived alone except for the cats that she had a weakness for-- much of her salary went to veterinary care.  What happened was that her elderly parents who lived an hour away both got sick at the same time and needed her, their only child, to live with them; meanwhile, work made her travel for days on end. She just couldn’t return home to take care of the cats and felt she had no one to turn to for help.  My colleague had to face legal and social  consequences for the misfortune on top of her misery, but the oligarchs and their minions never do and who do you hold accountable for my starvation when those in charge are the ones who let (wanted) it to happen?  If you are following my drift, when the population gets down to a manageable number, starvation continues to be used as both a motivator for the hard labor that needs to be done to maintain the owner class (the military and constabulary are well fed for instance) and a way to keep maintenance of the hard labor force cheap.  Like the Europeans did with the slaves.  

Anyhoo, these are my pleasant thoughts about what we’re in for.  This is a bit where my feeling of urgency about things comes from.  When inert minds across the country spread worry about the contrived hypothetical perils of “socialism” and not about the very real horrors that are already manifesting in the service of techno feudalism you get the sense that we might be too late.  But we mustn’t act that way.  I think we need to keep people conscious of who the enemy is.  Social media (and the news it spreads of the economy / bad news / ravaging of the environment / scarcity) is designed to keep us thinking that the enemy is the person who could starve you reaching for the last loaf of bread in front of your face at the supermarket.   We’re not included in the plans of the owners, obviously.  We need to get rid of them or at a minimum to neuter and neutralize them, but in order for that to happen we need solidarity down here.  No more right left.  Just down up.  But we have to foster solidarity here to get us through the hard times to come without letting them get away with murder of the masses and enslavement of the survivors.  That’s why I think unplugged is the way to go—unplugged from the traps of social media.  I think some sort of mass movement of magazines and music and entertainment could do it.  It would have to be fun, to make solidarity fun too.  To make it a much more attractive alternative to the dog-eat-dog chaos they want it to be.

Getting rid of any and every benefit of the government; getting rid of any progress in peacemaking, “affordable health care” and any initiative to address global warming—  I know they’re evil idiots and not evil geniuses—that’s their one saving grace.  But I think they are going to make the most of Trump’s term (or terms if they can swing extending it) to make things as safe for them and as chaotic for the rest of us as they can.  I don’t think they’ve thought through what happens when people catch onto them.  I think they’re planning to keep that from happening, but they’re not geniuses.   They’re extremely powerful, but they’re not infallible.  

Χάος

Giovan Francesco Capoferri

In the beginning was Chaos, who begat Night (Nyx) and Darkness (Erebus).  Darkness and Night fooled around, fell in love and begat Day, and Aether, but also Death, Dreams, War and Famine.  And in the beginning too was Chaos.  (Some say it was better then.)  We English speakers are not unusual in that we get our word for the disordered state from Greek, but the concept is universal.  How is Chaos called around the world in different tongues?  Let's find out!  (Approximate pronunciations are in parentheses in italics).

Arabic -فوضى. (Fawda)
Amharic -ትርምስ (Tirimisi)
Basque - Kaosa; Anabasa
Bengali -বিশৃঙ্খলা (Bisrinkhala)
Chinese -混沌 (Hundun)
Dhihevi (Maldives) - ހާލަތުގޯސްވެފައިވުން (Haalathugoasvefaivun)
Icelandic -Glundroða; Ringulreið
Igbo -Ogbaaghara
Estonian -Kaos; Segadus

Guarani (Paraguay, Brazil) - Sarambikue

Dutch - Warboel
Balinese - Kacau

Lakota - Taku Skanskan 

Hindi - अव्यवस्था (Avyavastha)

Ga (Ghana) - Basabasa

Haitian Creole - Dezòd; Tètanba

Irish - Cíor thuathail (Keer huhail)

Quechua - Chaqru
Japanese -カオス (Kaosu);無秩序 (Muchitsujo)
Korean -혼돈 (Hondon)
Romanian - Haos
Manx -Corvaal

Thai - ความวุ่นวาย (Khwam wunway)

Hungarian -Zűrzavar
Hawaiian - Haunaele

Tibetan - ཟང་ཟིང་ (Zang zing)

Wolof (Senegal, The Gambia, Mauritania) - Yàqquteef

Inuktitut (Inuit) - Tiriqquit

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) - Vekuveku

Hebrew - תוֹהוּ וָבוֹהוּ. (Tohu vevohu)

Old Norse - Hrǫngl; Vafi

Russian -Беспорядок. (Byesporyadok)

Marshallese - Poktak

Vietnamese - Sự hỗn loạn

Navajo -   Naayéé; Hóchxǫ́ǫ́

Mongolian - Эмх замбараагүй байдал (Emkh zambaraagüi baidal)

Nahuatl - Tlaxitinilia

Tahitian -Fa'aheuea

Malagasy - Korontana

Javanese - Kekacauan
Tswana - Mmudubudu
Greek -χάος

Just asking

Do humans require society?  Does society require artificial distinctions?  If so, why do they seem to require codification and why is there variation in the codification?   Is codification of the hierarchy an epigenetic part of being human?  Are all codifications necessary evils?  Laws seem to be the code in place to maintain existing inequalities.  Must the top of the hierarchy always be rotten?  Can real justice be codified?  Can it replace hierarchy? 

The West has a reasonable claim to being the champ when it comes to hierarchical ordering of society.  But there are still hierarchies in Chinese society (and Japanese and Aztec and Hawaiian and etc..).  Makes one wonder, do we need hierarchies?  Why is hierarchy not a subject of our philosophy (other than as something to codify)?  Why do we not view it as a problem to solve? I understand those at the top of the hierarchy exert undue influence on our institutions of learning and knowledge, but why are our best minds not obsessed with how to flatten the social structure in order to benefit from the vast and varied deep bench of human experience and wisdom?  I know those at the top don't want us to solve this problem , but why do we listen to them?  They aren't the boss of us.   I’m just axing questions.   I know there are or have been societies without hierarchies but not at the level of state or city-state it seems.  I feel sortition could be a way to “solve hierarchies”.  But if people “need hierarchies” I may be wrong about that. 

I’m obsessed lately with our inability in this country certainly to ever do the right thing.*  Inequality we can do.  Injustice we got down. Imperiling the planet?  We got this!  Genocide assistance?  You betcha!  Repeating the worst hits of history? Hold our beer! Outrage over appeals for decency?  Check check and check!  Ban the most popular platform for creativity and free expression among young people?  Smell us! Universal healthcare?   No can do!!

I almost wish we had the luxury to get this wrong-- that some selfish assholes were gonna be assholes basically and those were the billionaires or the billionaire wannabes, and it’s a big world-- room enough for everybody including the socialists so just blow the assholes off.  But we don’t have the luxury because it’s our planet’s destruction and the misery of billions that enables their assholery.  (Happy New Year by the way!  ^_^)   

I also am obsessed lately with this imbalance of power between thoughtfulness and munitions.  Those wannabes and billionaires have guns and will use them and do.  We just have our thoughts.  When they figured out they could win by threatening and carrying out violence-- and that as long as they kept winning the arms race nothing bad was going to happen to them-- the game was lost for the rest of us.

So we're just going to let them win? 

~~~~~

* I have this sort of weird new tack lately in my approach to capitalism, socialism, techno-feudalism and what not.  Namely: I have no control over it.  I can conceive of a better system.  I can tell people what my better system is.  I can critique the current system to a tee.  And we’re still doomed.   You might think this is related to the bad influence of Robert Sapolsky on my thinking, but actually I have been feeling this way for a while. I mean it’s obviously true, right?, so you can’t really say it’s not.  I guess it’s the doom feeling I have about it that’s a bit different.  Like, what am I trying for?  (When the partial answer is, “I mean, how hard are you really trying?”  Ok it’s more than a partial answer.  But I am feeling a tad bit more like I am in an incredibly small minority of people, meaning, people on the left, in spite of how large it looms in my life.  It consumes me, f’chris’sakes.  But all evidence points to the fact that it’s a very powerless, disjointed and miniscule segment of society.  And the rest of society thinks it’s wrong.  Right or wrong.  Its life force is faint and getting fainter.)  

Two Tsintsadze Miniatures

The following is a performance by Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital with a Korean chamber orchestra of Song and Sachidao, two of Sulkhan Tsintsadze's 1988 Eight Miniatures on Georgian Folk Tunes.  The piece was composed by Tsintsadze three years before his death in Tbilisi in 1991 at 66, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  You don't need to know that Sachidao is a traditional accompaniment of the ancient Georgian Martial Art of Chidaoba to enjoy it.