Watch “Barbara Ehrenreich – Smile or Die” on YouTube

 

I love the full (British) title of her new book: Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

 

 

What to Worry About and How

It’s a bigger problem than I originally thought. It’s possible we really DO need a book called ‘What to Worry About and How‘. It can get pretty confusing pretty quickly. Here are three topics. Which one should we worry about, if any, and how should we go about this worrying:

1) Some libraries in Some states are Not stocking ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ - this is censorshio

2) The San Francisco Public Library does Not block pornography - this is non-censorship

3) We are horrified by mass murders by lone psycopaths  - this is real life, not a movie franchise

4) We love movies about mass murders by lone psychopaths – one billions dollars. same movie franchise

5) Women are murdered in public execution - at least it didn’t happen in Our Country

6) Young girls are stolen off the streets and murdered - this happens in Our Country all the time.

Let’s go down the list, shall we, even though there is no end to lists like this?

1 and 2) It always comes down to so-called “community standards”. Either your local community is run by self-righteous judgmental morons or not. It’s not about religion. It’s about imposing opinions through power.

3 and 4) You can’t have your cake and eat it too. A society that glorifies violence is going to be violent. A culture that loves guns and bombs is going to have guns and bombs. Look in the mirror – or just look at the damn movie! What the hell are we doing?

5 and 6) A lot of men are vicious beasts, everywhere. Don’t go bragging about your own damn country. Violence against women has got to become ancient history.

Of the three sets of issues here, I’d rank the last pair highest, the second pair next, and the first pair last. I don’t really care so much about libraries banning or not banning stuff. Libraries? Really? Get the fucking book somewhere else (and I mean that literally).

Locks and Wolves

Every time I get a haircut, I am reminded of the great immortal Ramtha, whose spirit spoke through his representative on this lowly plane, advising Beverly Hills housewives on their hairstyles.

I was also thinking about the lone wolf, as a tea party wolf, telling the other wolves ‘you should all be lone wolves’, and the pack replied, ‘but we are pack animals. we have young to care for. we have responsibilities to each other. ‘

The lone wolf insists that they should all be lone wolves. no,  they say. only you are the lone wolf.

For and Against

I’ve been politically ‘aware’ for most of my life – one of my earliest memories is of holding my grandfather’s hand as we marched in Manhattan in the early 60s for civil rights. My parents and grandparents on my mother’s side were rather radical, and even today, my parents (in their 80s) are still quite attuned to political events. Unfortunately they are also somewhat demoralized. Not wanting to share that particular fate, I’ve sort of partially reconciled myself to a future of humanity that takes a balanced approach. I have reasons for both optimism and pessimism.

On the one hand, it seems more and more true to me that inequality is the natural tendency of human groups of every scale, from family to friends to peers to cultures and nations. It’s like a law, like gravity or entropy – a permanently weighted tendency. On the other hand, the struggle against inequality is just as natural, brought on when things go overboard. We may be starting to see some of that in the US with the Occupy Wall Street happenings (though I have my doubts. We have not reached extremes here such as in Egypt, Tunisia or Libya earlier this year).

On the one hand, population growth continues to be maddening and frightening, but on the other hand, technology is enabling the floor of poverty to be raised quite generally, and the most destitute in the next century will be living healthier, more educated, more liberated (women in particular) and less child-bearing than currently or before, and that has to be considered a positive. War and cruelty ought to diminish as standards of living rise, but never vanish due to rule number one – the tendency toward inequality.

There is no reason to be overly optimistic about the future of humanity, but no reason to be overly pessimistic either. That’s my balanced approach!

Occupado

#OccupyWallStreet reminds me of what Rocky always said to Bullwinkle: That trick never works!

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it will be the start of something that will have an effect on next year’s elections, but without a majority on Congress, no real changes can take place. This is something the Republicans understood with their sham ‘populist’ movement. OccupyWallStreet needs financial backing and it will likely come from unions, which would make it merely the Democrats version of the Tea Party

Russell Brand sums it up

Politicians don’t represent the interests of people who don’t vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected

true dat

Stories we tell ourselves and why sometimes they don’t fucking matter

I read two essays today on different subjects which irked me the same way, and after thinking about it I finally realized why. One, by Drew Westen in the New York Times, was an attack on Barack Obama. The other, by Reza Aslan in The Washington post, was an attack on the so-called ‘New Atheists’ (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, etc … but no mention of Gian Carlo Spallanzini? Haven’t they read Orange Car with Stripes or Missy Tonight?). Both of these essays could be summed up neatly, with a tip of the cap to The Rude Pundit, to “hey, we like sucking on our mamma’s teat until we’re fully sated and sleepy. Please go away and let us suck suck suck”

You see, the “error” of Barack Obama has been his inability to sufficiently satisfy our bedtime story needs. He hasn’t properly told us the right stories in the right way to send us off to sleepyland with happiness and joy. And the “error” of the “New Atheists” is they are not letting us enjoy our comfy Bible/Koran/Torah/Mormon tits in peace, because those mean individuals refuse to acknowledge how much we love it so much that it all must be true in some elusively deep way that cannot be explained by anyone ever ever ever.

Missing the fucking point, of course, that making laws that punish other people based on your own willful ignorance is WRONG and that’s what atheists old and new have against your fundamentalists and evangelicals of all stripes.

Missing the fucking point, of course, that the President of the United States is not your babysitter or your parent or your prostitute and it isn’t his job to breastfeed you.

The essays, of course, are far more politely written than my coarse, indignant response, but those guys are paid for their scribblings and I can say whatever the heck I want because I’m blissfully nobody nowhere. Oh, and to any future potential employers reviewing this blog post online, move along now, there’s nothing to see here …

Writers and scientists and politicians and anyone else, for that matter, do not exist merely to re-affirm your daily affirmations, to prove to you what you already believe, to tell you what you want to hear, what you think you already know, or to put things in such a way as to please your ears, fill your belly, make you drowsy and let you drift off into never-neverland. No, that is the role of the candy and soda you stuff yourself with, the booze you guzzle, the drugs you sniff, snort, smoke and shoot, the TV and movies you passively gaze at, the thick bestsellers whose pages you avidly turn and all that shit you can buy in such bulk that you need a fucking rental storage shed to stick it all in.

You see, because the “error” is the way we go along believing our own fairy tales and lies, not the people who are trying to wake us up with a bit of common sense! Take the “credit rating downgrade” of the U.S. for example, which just occurred the other day. Citizens of this country believe, with incredible audacity, that the U.S. is some exceptional God-given ruler of the world, that it’s mandatory for us to spend trillions of dollars on military dominance and we’ll never have to pay for it! God will pay for it! Whose trillions of dollars are these and where do they come from? And we will hold on to this mythology (which, by the way, is only about 70 years old) until we’ve totally wrecked our economy and the nation lies in ruins. There’s nothing anyone can say about it. We won’t pay for it with taxes – oh no, not us! Taxes BAD. We won’t let anybody question “THE TROOPS” and what the fuck are they doing all over the world? We SUPPORT them, with someone else’s money, that is, with Chinese money, and then we resent them for it too. Would we listen to Barack Obama if he told us THIS story? Not a chance. What can he say? It’s a roller coaster, folks, and what goes up …. you know the rest.

What are heroes?

I was saying this yesterday and today I find Andrew Sullivan saying pretty much the same thing, about the nuclear power plant workers in Japan:

We use the word “hero” these days rather promiscuously, sometimes becoming a synonym for veteran. But these workers, essentially sacrificing their future lives to save millions of others, seem to me to fit the description in inspiring ways. In this darkness, their light flickers.

I was saying that it seems to me that historically, heroes are individuals who died to save others. They died! Not any more. In the modern world of entertainment-or-bust, heroes are people who risk dying but don’t. Instead, they always save the world, get laid, make a lot of money, and live happily ever after.

Why have we come to treat heroism so lightly? It used to be rare, and rightly so. If only it were rarer. I would rather these brave Japanese men and women had no need whatsoever to be heroes. The biggest earthquake I’ve ever heard of, followed by the biggest tsunami I ever heard of, and then this nuclear power plant disaster. So sad for all of those people who never deserved this – especially the nuclear power plants. Not one of those should ever have been built anywhere on this planet.

This revolution is being televised

watching live coverage of Tahrir Square as Mubarak is expected momentarily to announce his resignation. Military coup seems likely and then what? That is clearly not what the people want. This is fascinating, like watching the Paris Commune unfold. How rare and how extraordinary

Such a thing as bad publicity

“US diplomatic cables on Wikileaks have revealed that Mr Suleiman was named as Israel’s preferred candidate for the job”

that’s bound to go over well in Egypt!