The Scorpian of Corporate Capitalism

This article will be difficult to read if one is from the United States mainstream culture. Perhaps it has too much truth for those whom it describes. The rest of the world will mostly agree with most of this poet's description of the system which destroys even those who would not read his poem. My own experiences verify the impressions of this poet for the vast majority of those I meet on the net from the States, but certainly not all.

The Frog and the Scorpian

Image by TinyPic

By Vi Ransel
2/14/09
Souce
A frog and a scorpion met on a stream bank. The scorpion asked the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asked, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” “Because if I do, I’ll drown, too” answered the scorpion. So they set out across the stream. Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog. As the frog started to sink, he knew they’d both die. With his last breath, he gasped to the scorpion, “Why?!” “It is my nature. And you knew I was a scorpion.”

Americans do not want the facts.
They do not want to hear how many countries
we’ve invaded for power and money
nor the number of proxy wars
financed in our name for the same.

Americans do not want to talk
about slavery, the Native Americans
or our rape of “Third World” nations
for necessities like bananas or coltan for cell phones
via the IMF, the World Bank and “free” trade.

Americans do not want to see
that compliant puppet governments
and dictators are America’s best friend,
that anywhere real democracy rears its unwelcome head
it’s put down by demonizing it and its leaders and/or killing them.
(See Mossadegh, Hamas, Allende and Hugo Chavez .)

Americans do not want to admit
that terrorism is not caused by hatred
or envy of our “freedoms”, but by our invasions,
torture, exploitation and slaughter,
or that the US sends three billion taxpayer dollars
to Israel yearly to test white phosphorus,
J-DAMS, DIMES and GBU-39s
on the captive population of Gaza.

Americans will not even try
to understand that depressions and recessions,
repetitive bubbles and Wall Street’s speculative gambling
are planned in advance by the shameless fat cats
of the plutocracy and the “Federal” banksters.

Americans will not entertain the idea
that American business uses human shields it calls “illegals”
to stave of the threat of paying a living wage
and if they ask for one the boss just calls la migra.

Americans do not want to know
that Main Street was murdered by Wal-Mart and Wall Street,
or that prisons are plantations where the process of manufacturing
is just business carried on by other means.

Americans do not want to hear
that health insurance is a middle man
designed to bleed them into medical bankruptcy,
or that credit is just debt with a fancy name
created to rob them of their homes and their property.

Americans do not want to believe
that plastic is strangling the ocean,
that petro-agriculture is poisoning their food,
that the rain forest’s been razed for cheeseburgers,
and that climate change, misnamed “global warming”,
warms the “heart” of Big Energy’s shareholders.

Americans do not want to be reminded
of the animal holocaust in “farms” that are factories,
which in addition to terror and agony
causes stroke, heart disease and obesity,
or that the runoff makes drinking water a toxic cocktail
of hormones, antibiotics and feces,
that most of the ocean’s big fish have been fished
and commercial trawlers scrape the ocean bottom lifeless,
that continual solitary driving of their personal vehicles
helps strand polar bears on the remnants of ice flows.

Americans don’t want to look at the fact
that sex, fear and envy persuade them
to buy products that kill them for profit -
alcohol, tobacco, meat and dairy, food additives,
prescription drugs, corn syrup and plastics.

Americans do not want to admit
that love, family, friendship and sexuality
are now no more than profitable commodities,
that wars, sports, TV, shopping and celebrities
are designed to keep their minds off the rape of democracy.
Americans cannot be bothered to discover the political priorities
of people they vote for in the electoral extravaganza,
to look for alternative info though newspapers, TV “news” and talk radio
are talking points and sheer propaganda,
or to acknowledge that the people who “represent” them
have not the people’s, but their own, interest in mind,
due to campaign funding’s lucrative bonanza.

Americans refuse to see
that schools don’t educate for a reason.
An educated public is 300 million dangerous threats
and schools are used to defuse these

by a pre-emptive indoctrination of children
with the wisdom of dog-eat-dog competition
which creates the divide-and-conquer infrastructure
that allows oppressors to blame their own victims.

And since kids might stumble into cooperation and empathy,
those in social programs are deemed weak and pathetic
in an effort to get the victims to agree and accept
that they’re the primary cause of the system’s effect.

The plutocracy exercises increasing dominion
via consolidation of capital at the people’s expense
concentrates it periodically, ratcheting up its intensity,
during engineered crises like wars and depressions.

The United States is no longer the home of the free and the brave
where life, liberty and happiness are pursued,
but of people living in fear of financial and physical terrorism
and co-opted by the carnival of consumerism.

It’s a cauldron of inequality, poverty and misery
where lives are lived in quiet desperation,
in free(dom of) speech zones and the pursuit of stuff
in a marked down and militarized nation.

Americans refuse to believe that they’ve accepted to live
under a system that subjugates, denigrates and infantilizes them,
and that the many creating the wealth at the bottom
are engineered as ignorant, obedient and defensive.

And as the money is funneled up to the few
the many are bought off with shiny oil-based objects -
I-pods, X boxes, PCs, plasma TVs, SUVs,
McMansions, Mickey D’s, boob jobs and botox -

strung on a charm bracelet/slave chain
of the non-negotiable American lifestyle
constructed on the ashes our foreign trade policies
have made of other people’s rights and their lives.

Americans seem not to notice
that nature has been reduced from The Source
to a package of exploitable resources,
and that citizens are relegated to being consumers
who, in turn, are eaten up by their choices

or that a not-so-invisible hand signs the legislation
that makes foreign and domestic American policy
and turns what started as participatory democracy
into a Donner Party version of economics.

Americans don’t want
to hear, to see, to speak, or to feel
anything
about what’s actually happening to them
or being done in their name,
but most of all they don’t want to
THINK
because thinking leads to
cognitive dissonance and confronting the pain
of knowing how the American lifestyle
is, and has been, maintained.

But the aversion therapy administered in schools
and cultural reinforcement thereafter
keeps them safely away from
the truth,
imprisoned like dogs
with electronic shock collars.

And besides, they’re so busy with their shopping,
which is Americans’ ultimate function,
that they don’t have the time to tune into
what that “little voice” has been trying to tell them

that this system relentlessly perpetuates itself
by means of infinite, unlimited growth,
which it carries on by any means necessary
like a parasite that strangles its host.

It has to kill the goose (that’s us)
who lays the Gross Domestic Product Golden Egg
because it’s a no-holds-barred, winner-take-all,
every man on his own for himself free-for-all
until there are no eggs left to take.

It’s not ’til they’re drowning in hubris and debt
and the system turns around and stings them
that Americans are willing to hear what they already knew -
the scorpion is corporate capitalism.

Vi Ransel is an anti-capitalist poet of exceptional caliber.

A Commodity Called Misery

The fabric of American consciousness is an enigma to most Americans: they have been trained to see the Emperor's new clothes and questions concerning how they came to be sure of who and what they are, are taboo in mainstream media. Yet the culture which suckles them has been deliberate in isolating their lives from those of their neighbours and from the rest of the world. It is impossible for them to see another way of being, for the most part.

That is why conversations with Americans usually focus on one of three topics, me, me or me. I feel a certain amount of pity for this zombie like mentality while simultaneously loathing it. Yet they have not gotten to be denizens of the US Twilight Zone without the help of many professionals who have given them a sense of reality which serves the system entirely. An excellent exploration of the American psychosis that serves its masters below.

A Commodity Called Misery

By JOE BAGEANT
Source

Our authorized sanities are so many Nembutals. "Normal" citizens with store-dummy smiles stand apart from each other like cotton-packed capsules in a bottle. Perpetual mental out-patients. Maddeningly sterile jobs for strait-jackets, love scrubbed into an insipid "functional personal relationship" and Art as a fantasy pacifier... And we all know this… Slowly, very slowly we are led nowhere.

---San Francisco Digger Papers, 1965

HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE.

Sitting down here in Central America happily abusing my health, occasionally, between the hangovers and the bouts with sand fleas and mosquitoes comes an insight or two, or at least what passes for insight in my lowbrow take on life. One of these is just how damned lucky the Third World is that it cannot afford a sophisticated mental health system. By that I mean the kind in the “developed countries,” where murder and suicide rates are quintuple what they are here in this village. Not that we are without own village resources. My Garifuna buddy Eljay, was in what we would call a depressed state a few months ago, and went to a local “spirit doctor.” The wizened old spirit mojo man cured Eljay with a single utterance: “Quit smokin’ da ganja for one month.” It worked. Total cost: About $2.50 and a pound of red beans. They say the old spirit doctor also treats such things as sexual dysfunction, though I sure as hell cannot detect much evidence of dysfunction, judging from the noises in the village cabanas and under beachside palms at night.

In any case, it causes me to wonder why is there enough pain and alienation to sustain America’s umpteen billion dollar mental health business and its 400-plus specialties, not to mention the inner self-help industry and Deepak Chopra’s royal court. Why is it that during the months I spend in America I meet so many obviously sick fuckers, some successfully practicing law or politics, others homeless and schizophrenic?

You need not be Marcus or R.D. Lang to feel the stress, depression, boredom and loneliness permeating everyday life up there in Gringolia. But to get an overview it does help to be a couple thousand miles outside the place. Kind of like being high in the stands at the racetrack with binoculars rather than down at the rail next to the paddock. Matters seem especially acute of late, with the entire American anthill in turmoil as its common god, the almighty economy, waves bye-bye while being noisily sucked down the global gurgler. Hell, twenty years ago mental health problems were already being described as “epidemic,” despite the joys of Facebook, iPod, and the consumption of some 25 million pounds of hot wings on Superbowl Sunday. A place where “normal” life includes Viagra, all the fried chicken you can stuff, round the clock televised crotch shots and HDTV as national mandate.

I used to think it was just some melancholic germ of my own that made me see a slowly increasing American alienation, anxiety and inner sadness over the span of my 62 years. Now however, I’m pretty convinced there is a national pathology at work, one which author Arthur Barsky called the “pathology of American normalcy.” Sounds accurate to me. In fact, this psychic poverty has been around so long it has become something of a norm. Despite that we have not resorted to cannibalism, single payer health care, or god forbid, socialism, we long ago passed into the realm of what we like to call an “unhealthy society.” Might not America’s psychological malaise be the result of knowing deep inside that life can hold more meaning --- be more joyful? More emotionally rewarding and fulfilling? In a word, healthier?

Americans who can afford to be, are obsessed with health of any kind. The rest of us chain smoke in despair. All of which makes tosses fresh red meat to the politicians, who offer “plans,” all of which come down to the same thing --- we pay for corporate expansion of both the insurance and “medical industry,” but through insignificantly different methods. Interestingly, despite our pursuit of constant medical attention and the construction of the planet’s largest, and most profitable health machinery, treatment factories for every real and imagined or industry manufactured ailment, surveys show, Americans do not trust doctors. They feel physicians are primarily businessmen or businesswomen who happen to practice medicine because that’s where the real grease, the big bucks are. This may or may not be true, but we see little evidence to counter their suspicions. Even the closest physician friend I have in the States insists on a $125 office visit --- cash at the front desk on the way out, please --- before he will refill a blood pressure prescription I’ve been taking for 15 years. He knows I do not have health insurance, but hey, what’s a bill and a quarter between friends? Well, it’s a month’s grub for some of us, or dinner and drinks for two at the country club for others.

By comparison, my doctor in Jalisco, Mexico, Jim Jaramillo, who practiced in Albuquerque for 30 years, invites me to ride into the surrounding ranch country and have a dawn drink with the Mexican cowboys, simply because he regards all his patients as friends. And “Nurse Judy,” who runs the main clinic here in Hopkins, whoops it up with the rest of her patients on Friday oldies night down by the beach. The village’s Dr. Anya, a Mayan-mestizo lady trained in Mister Castro’s famous Cuban institution, dropped by my cabana to examine the local kids on my front porch. For free. Then we played guitar together. I asked her if she could teach me any local folk songs. “No,” she said, “I’m into Iris Dementh.” Go figure. Anyway, none of these doctors require appointments.

But we started out talking about the psychic pathology of Americaness, didn’t we? So without going too far over ground well enough covered by better and more authoritative writers than I, the pathology of Americaness is entirely about human consciousness, a taboo subject in our declining industrial super state. The subject has been officially smothered, or even demonized by authority since it was first openly broached in the Sixties. However, those running the industrial government complex learned a few things too in the process. Particularly about the efficacy of dope. Being authoritarian and capitalist, they of course preferred downers over the mind expanding drugs. And ever since then corporately produced biochemicals, tranqs, mind numbing anti-depressants and the like, have been successfully used privately on individuals to squelch the psychic anguish produced in the Darwinian workhouse America has become. Not that I’m entirely opposed. As I’ve said before, if this officially sanctioned dope were a bit more ecstatic and colorful, I’d be right there in line for my share. Hell, I’m an American --- instant gratification works for me too. But an anesthetic to workhouse burnout just ain’t enough incentive. Beyond that, the street drugs are crap these days. So to our King Kong pharmaceutical industry, I say: “Work with me here guys!”

Seriously though, back in the Sixties, along with LSD, nature and Buddhism, I looked to psychology for answers. Sure, psychology was very much a bourgeois affectation and fad at the time. But it looked damned promising to many of us, including a redneck hippie with tons of cultural and family baggage to unload and an allergy to mindless toil --- especially those aspects of psychology that dealt with social realization.

But who’d have guessed it would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored “mental heath system? And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members. Now collective societal responsibility is common sense for, say, a Dane or a Frenchman. Most of them anyway.

For Americans though, it’s an explosive issue. Because if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country. Some gestures are now being made in that direction, thanks to Obama, but it’s still America’s longest standing hot tater I doubt even he will hold very long. Every successful, well-off American, or even so called middle class Americans --- we seem to be unable to truly define them; even uninsured households earning under $25,000 most often define themselves as middle class, thanks to our national denial of our class system --- succeeds at the expense of some other American. Or more accurately at the expense of an entire unacknowledged underclass of them. Consequently, we get the “self-determination” and “individual initiative” stuff as an excuse and cover-up. An attractive one too, given that it implies some sort of superiority of effort or talent. And there’s no denying that life requires some of both from everyone. But that does not reconcile our larger than ever class discrepancies, much less the alienation one feels when he or she cannot trust that his or her society is operating on their behalf.

Whatever else can be said of capitalism, it is miraculous stuff, pure alchemy. It can privatize and corporatize any damned thing under the sun, turn a profit on it, and then make it a bulwark of corporate state control to boot. Even human misery and oppression of soul and mind. Psychological practice and its institutions benefit greatly from this. After all, they are in the alienation business. It is entirely in the profession’s best interests that it treat us as if our lives are lived in a vacuum, our loneliness and despair are entirely our own, as if there were no such thing as context, much less American society’s corrosive and toxic environment in which so many of us live out our lives. Put another way, it acknowledges our misery, then privatizes it, then administers lonely alienated “treatment” for our emptiness in a private void, one among tens of millions of like emptinesses in similar voids that are in no way supposed to be societal. No matter that there are enough sufferers to constitute an entire society in themselves. The result, whether or not by design, is to perpetuate the most venerable of American myths, that of the completely autonomous self. Which denies us the power and beauty, not to mention the healing and efficacy, of human unity. In the big picture, much of the U.S. mental health industry, and its associated systems, perpetuate and even propagate mental sickness perhaps as much as it alleviates, through its paradigms. In any case, for the most part, psychology as an institution has hardened into part of the national ideology, thanks to the catalyst of gobs of dough from the state. The American Psychological Association’s initial refusal to condemn member participation in the Bush regime’s torture told me all I needed to know about U.S. psych-officialdom.

This somehow reminds me of the old Soviet Union’s psychiatric handling of dissidents. If you did not display state defined norms, then you were deemed nuts, and needed medication, behavior modification or institutionalization. It was deemed impossible that those very norms may have been driving your condition. The similarities are there, particularly when you consider the massive growth of the U.S. prison industry and its reliance on pharmaceutical and behavior modification control. The entire machinery of education, social work, psychology, and medicine are meshed (though the practitioners would stoutly deny it) and help hold firm the class line in this country. Many of them do so unknowingly, of course, and are dedicated to helping fellow beings through the methods they have been taught --- and and are accredited through state sanctioned institutions of course. But the overwhelming majority seem to draw their paychecks and health insurance happily enough, Ever spend much time with the average mid-American social services psychologist? The kind who make recommendations in our juvenile courts, etc? On the whole they’re a sorry assed bunch if ever there was one, bureaucrats wrapped in the smug piety of social work. Others are far more aware, but fearful of calling bullshit on the system that pays the mortgage and sends the kids to college.

Given the economic and societal breakdown now underway and accelerating toward completion, Obama or no Obama (What is this thing of ours, this national obsession with saviors, elected or otherwise?), it’s bound to be interesting to see if they can indoctrinate, dope, counsel, and lock up or medicate the dissidence, and perhaps outright resistance that will occur. Whether the final American collapse takes four years or forty years is anybody’s guess. But it’s gonna take a passel of behavioral management experts, whether in psychological institutions, university research centers, or on Madison Avenue, to keep the lid on this puppy when she blows. However, I’m not ruling out the possibility that they just might help do that --- keep the lid on --- because they are state authorized and accredited to do so. The infrastructure of industrial strength administration of psychology is there. And has been ever since sheepskins were issued to “industrial psychologists.” Nobody in the Western World seems to see the irony and conflict in that term. But the fact is that even if 50 million Americans exploded tomorrow, they would have “snapped” alone, particulated and atomized in a very large and spread out country, and ultimately be administered treatment or institutionalized as “individuals.” Of course if they if they were more concentrated, which would put them in a situation to act in unison, then god help ‘em because they would then be a national security problem, the last thing you want to be in a security state.

Obviously, I’m no psychiatrist, and am sure to get plenty of email offering certain proof of that, plus proof that I am a paranoid nutcase with authority problems (I’ll gladly admit to the latter), though in more polite professional jargon. To which I say less politely, “Fuck ‘em all!” I see what I see.

And what I see, based upon my own experience and watching that of others, is that alienation and the pain of utter aloneness, is in the rootstock of nearly all psychic malady, excepting the clearly organic. If when we look around us in the world, we do not see ourselves in society, nor does society see itself in us, we eventually come to feel the sustained, unutterable pain of aloneness. This would seem the appropriate response for a member of our highly social species of flesh, and does not necessarily deem us ill, but often rather more human.

Unfortunately, Americans get laughed off the map for being overly human these days, dubbed emotional pussies, part of the Kumbaya crowd, unrealistic utopians …and if you are sincerely human enough, get your ass kicked by the system. To be so makes us the bane of the super rational, technological production driven society we have come to be. We got there partly through our weakness, shallow greed and mindless consent, but more so by the orchestrated world machinery benefiting powerful elites, both corporate, governmental and financial (is there a difference?) which have always been among us, though never in such strength.

Many years ago as a much younger man, I went through a couple of major depressions, the second of which brought me to the brink of suicide. In the first instance I was somewhat helped, through medication and “talk therapy,” by a psychologist who eventually killed himself. They found him in a tree in his back yard with his beeper going off. This is not to disparage the man in any way. Dr. John Farley was a man of good will, good intent and great compassion.

The second time though, I walked out of the abyss by myself. And along the way I encountered, sought out really, others on the same path. And I saw that together, in open sharing of our personal truths, most of not all of us were nowhere near mentally ill. Just sick. Sick even to the point of death in some cases, of our spiritual imprisonment within the Great Machine, but strong enough to refuse under any circumstances to dwell under its spiritual humiliation.

Contrary to what one might think, in the many years since I’ve not much thought about those experiences. Just moved on. But in this new and strange era in which we find ourselves, they’ve returned as subjects of contemplation. And --- judge me as you will --- like many others these days, I smell the breath of Thanos in that machinery of the system unto which we supplicate in our fear, denial or intentional obliviousness.

Still, it is only a system. Systems can be changed. In any case they inevitably crash entirely of their own entropies. Doubtlessly, ours will take down with it the hardening privatization and institutional control of the human spirit. I won’t be around to see it.

But I would be damned pleased to see such a once noble attempt at elimination of suffering as the American psychological profession rise to the choices before us --- liberation from our collective societal darkness, and psychic death within the machine.

Meanwhile, here in Hopkins Village, darkness has come and brought with it good old Eljay, ready to split a bottle of the local bitters on my porch. The night winds are rising and with them comforting assurance that The Machine is not everything ... indeed, not anything by the light of these indifferent stars.

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. (Random House Crown), about working class America. He is also a contributor to Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance from the Heartland (AK Press). A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on ColdType and Joe Bageant’s website here.

Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Funny how a song can be for so many periods and represent so many different countries. I have always loved this song - it's American but could be for Russia, China, Europe Asia everywhere really - where good hearted people trusted governement and tried to live honest lives. I cannot think of a song more appropriate for the workers of the world right now.

They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it's done
Brother can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it's done
Brother can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell
Full of that yankee doodle dum
Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell
And I was the kid with a drum

Say, Don't you remember they called me Al?
It was Al all the time
Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal
Buddy can you spare a dime?

Video by Spanky here.

Peter Yarrow version here.

1933 pictures here.

Article on the Depression here.

Things I read Jan 30, 09 - Boiling frogs and dollars

Unemployment rate soars
"There are literally millions of workers unemployed with no hope of finding a new job," she said. "The queue is just too long."...A new survey by the Society for Human Resource Management also found that nearly 75 percent of human resource professionals from U.S. companies were expecting deeper job cuts in the U.S. labor force in the next few months.















Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Operations
Yes the past and future from the horses mouth...I have blogged on this before here. Search 'irregular warfare'.

Russian, Chinese PMs seek to seize control of the dollar
Whether or not Americans realise it, this is the worst possible news for them. By far the story they should be most afraid of. This is the beginning of the end for the dollar, Act IV of the tragedy.

"...the Putin and Wen call to regulate the dollar is a clear power play that would threaten the basic sovereignty of the U.S. government. It also reflects a new upsurge in Sino-Russian cooperation against the United States..."

Global Consciousness Project -Trans-Humanity Awakening To Reality
Do you think it's possible to think our way out of this mess??















Military And New Orleans Police Conducting Nite Time Helicopter Drills In City
Yeah no worries folks. If you put a frog in a pot of cold water and bring it slowly to a boil, the frog won't even realize that you are in the process of boiling it.




















Congress Seeks To Authorize & Legalize FEMA Camp Facilities
Froggies...CODE RED CODE RED!











Pew: Almost half of Americans want to live somewhere else

Officials: Army suicides at 3-decade high
WARNING - Taking the blossom of youth and training them to bomb, mutilate and torture other humans could be damaging to their health.














Iraq soldier crying
So many tears from so many people in so many countries. When will we learn that when we kill someone else, we kill ourselves too?

More Orwellian horror for English people.

Why Americans get a distorted View of the Conflict between Israel and Palestinians
The construction of delusion is in the details From Rainbow Warriors blog.

Up Yours
English froggies jumping out of the pot..... GO FROGGIES GO!














Obama's First Acts Of War

Names and Photos of Israeli War Criminals in Gaza
Many of these people may be charged by the Hague. Put nicely in context in Smoking Mirrors blog here. Don't wait long to look...these pictures have a way of disappearing.


I don't like to leave the bad news of the day without a little something...a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down...so they say. Here is a picture of the 'glass frog'.

The world in 2035

I wish I could say the following article is the Sci-fi plot of a new novel: it is not. The future as envisioned by the Ministry of Defence below is highly probable. Much supporting evidence is listed under 'Related' at the end of the article for those who like research.

The question which begs to be asked is this: What sort of earth could we have created if we hadn't spent most of our money on War technology and Wealth accumulation?

Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips.
A grim vision of the future

Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday 9 April 2007
Source
Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.

This is the world in 30 years' time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces. It includes an "analysis of the key risks and shocks". Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive".

The 90-page report comments on widely discussed issues such as the growing economic importance of India and China, the militarisation of space, and even what it calls "declining news quality" with the rise of "internet-enabled, citizen-journalists" and pressure to release stories "at the expense of facts". It includes other, some frightening, some reassuring, potential developments that are not so often discussed.

New weapons
An electromagnetic pulse will probably become operational by 2035 able to destroy all communications systems in a selected area or be used against a "world city" such as an international business service hub. The development of neutron weapons which destroy living organisms but not buildings "might make a weapon of choice for extreme ethnic cleansing in an increasingly populated world". The use of unmanned weapons platforms would enable the "application of lethal force without human intervention, raising consequential legal and ethical issues". The "explicit use" of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons and devices delivered by unmanned vehicles or missiles.

Technology
By 2035, an implantable "information chip" could be wired directly to the brain. A growing pervasiveness of information communications technology will enable states, terrorists or criminals, to mobilise "flashmobs", challenging security forces to match this potential agility coupled with an ability to concentrate forces quickly in a small area.

Marxism
"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

Pressures leading to social unrest
By 2010 more than 50% of the world's population will be living in urban rather than rural environments, leading to social deprivation and "new instability risks", and the growth of shanty towns. By 2035, that figure will rise to 60%. Migration will increase. Globalisation may lead to levels of international integration that effectively bring inter-state warfare to an end. But it may lead to "inter-communal conflict" - communities with shared interests transcending national boundaries and resorting to the use of violence.

Population and Resources
The global population is likely to grow to 8.5bn in 2035, with less developed countries accounting for 98% of that. Some 87% of people under the age of 25 live in the developing world. Demographic trends, which will exacerbate economic and social tensions, have serious implications for the environment - including the provision of clean water and other resources - and for international relations. The population of sub-Saharan Africa will increase over the period by 81%, and that of Middle Eastern countries by 132%.

The Middle East
The massive population growth will mean the Middle East, and to a lesser extent north Africa, will remain highly unstable, says the report. It singles out Saudi Arabia, the most lucrative market for British arms, with unemployment levels of 20% and a "youth bulge" in a state whose population has risen from 7 million to 27 million since 1980. "The expectations of growing numbers of young people [in the whole region] many of whom will be confronted by the prospect of endemic unemployment ... are unlikely to be met," says the report.

Islamic militancy
Resentment among young people in the face of unrepresentative regimes "will find outlets in political militancy, including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces", the report warns. The effects of such resentment will be expressed through the migration of youth populations and global communications, encouraging contacts between diaspora communities and their countries of origin.

Tension between the Islamic world and the west will remain, and may increasingly be targeted at China "whose new-found materialism, economic vibrancy, and institutionalised atheism, will be an anathema to orthodox Islam".

Iran
Iran will steadily grow in economic and demographic strength and its energy reserves and geographic location will give it substantial strategic leverage. However, its government could be transformed. "From the middle of the period," says the report, "the country, especially its high proportion of younger people, will want to benefit from increased access to globalisation and diversity, and it may be that Iran progressively, but unevenly, transforms...into a vibrant democracy."

Terrorism
Casualties and the amount of damage inflicted by terrorism will stay low compared to other forms of coercion and conflict. But acts of extreme violence, supported by elements within Islamist states, with media exploitation to maximise the impact of the "theatre of violence" will persist. A "terrorist coalition", the report says, including a wide range of reactionary and revolutionary rejectionists such as ultra-nationalists, religious groupings and even extreme environmentalists, might conduct a global campaign of greater intensity".

Climate change
There is "compelling evidence" to indicate that climate change is occurring and that the atmosphere will continue to warm at an unprecedented rate throughout the 21st century. It could lead to a reduction in north Atlantic salinity by increasing the freshwater runoff from the Arctic. This could affect the natural circulation of the north Atlantic by diminishing the warming effect of ocean currents on western Europe. "The drop in temperature might exceed that of the miniature ice age of the 17th and 18th centuries."

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Things I read - December 12, 2008

Inventor builds She-3PO robot
Errr...can I get one in the opposite sex?













Mexico to fingerprint mobile-phone owners
Big brother will not neglect Mexico. Doesn't this sound desperately similar to USA legislation? Maybe Mexico should just open a New Amsterdam and tax drugs; it might simplify things.

The Purpose Behind The Financial Crisis
The disappearance of the middle class? Where have I heard that before?

Police taser man in diabetic shock
Who cares?

ISPs Give Rudd Government Two Finger Salute
I love Aussies.

CIA holds young sons of captured al-Qa'eda
chief
2003 - the CIA is interrogating children. Wonder what they did with Aafia Siddiqui's two young children?

Secret ‘EU President’ talks begin as Ireland is forced to vote again on treaty
No matter what concessions the EU grants especially for Ireland, I will never tolerate Tony Blair as EU President, or Nicholas Sarkozy. For this reason alone, I will vote NO.

U.S. Treasury Standing By to Begin Nationalization of Big 3 Automakers
I wonder how fast than can re-tool to make armaments?

Our Vanishing Night - Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.
















EU parliament body scanners offer ‘virtual strip search’





















Iraq plans EU-style Middle East union
Soon, there will be only regional unions in currency and politics; which means stand alone countries will be at a great disadvantage if not members. There is some good here and some bad.

Bratislava resident renounces American citizenship, becomes stateless person Can't say as I blame him.

Honour and the American Apocalyse

Preface: Nothing more beautiful than rhetoric with the power of wisdom and indignation that challenges monsters. From the Dark Wraith.

Manifesto in Black

I know little that is genuine truth, but of this I am most certain: the United States government, as a matter of policy set each and every day to practice, systematically and of necessity lies. Its elected representatives, its civil servants, its judges, its contractors, its instrumentalities, agencies, commissions, operatives, and private advocates lie. They lie with numbers, and they lie with words.

Most perniciously, they lie with facts.

Their reports, their pronouncements, their justifications, their declarations, their accusations, their claims, their projections, and their promises are, prima facie, lies. The fruit of this poison tree issuing forth from the seeds of prevarication are the laws of the land: by the very nature of the seed from which is born this foodstuff that nourishes our civil society may not come a rule of law that is fit for all who live under the flag of this nation.

We have, in the words of the former neoconservative favorite Francis Fukuyama, come to the end of history: the legislation enacted by the Congresses, the affirmations by the Presidents, the interpretive and legislative rules crafted by government agencies are uniformly in their effect to the end of predating upon the weak to provide foul swill to a wanting public that is appeased by hateful violence of the state masquerading as law enforcement. No further history may be written when a civil society has become a docile mob living vicariously, even while cowering in fear, ignorant of the difference between compliance and obedience, assuming the latter is a refined and civilized extension of the former.

To believe anything that emanates from this government is to be at peril of embracing a lie, whether that lie be from a conservative or from a liberal. The individuals who comprise the sentient heart of this government are liars, and they must be such in order to be a part of this government. They cannot help themselves; they cannot even so much as see that they are lost to the lies they must sustain in order to remain a part of the official instrumentation of something far greater than they and far more corrupt than they should want themselves to be.

This, I know: only the truly evil conservatives and liberals want the nation we have come to have in this degraded century; yet, none of better nature can stop it. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is a bad man in any materially moral sense. Although the details of their visions of this nation may differ markedly, each wants a good place for the citizenry, a safe place for the people, and a free place for the men, women, and children of this world.

Neither, however, can give us back that which we have lost; so they must lie with earnest promises, meaningful plans, serious vows, and reasoned logic about the way forward to better times. And people will believe them; people will vote for them and be excited about them, and many of those people will remain hopeful even as these men, each in his own ways, renders evidence of his intention to do other than what his acolytes think he will do.

This is the way of the foolish as they goad their putative leaders forward along the narrowing passage of perilous lies below which is the chasm of precipitous, calamitous consequences.

For example, we can stay in Iraq as an occupation force, as John McCain would have us do, or we can leave in short order, as Barack Obama would want; but these two roads converge in a wilderness, and that place is called collective damnation. If we stay, we continue the destructive imposition of military presence ruling over people who want us gone; but if we leave, we wash our hands of the horrific tragedy we—yes, we a people—created. Both John McCain and Barack Obama must lie to the American people, for each is compelled to craft a platform to hide from those who would elect them the miserable truth that we have already made monsters of ourselves, and whatever we now do is to the purpose of serving ourselves, even as we, both liberals and conservatives, find our own convenient reasons for dismissing our absolute, categorical responsibility for the wreckage we have made of a sovereign nation.

Take a long, hard look at a killed Iraqi child. Tell yourself that this is not your doing. Soothe yourself. Tell yourself you are not responsible; it's someone else's doing. It's an insurgent; it's a bad American airstrike; it's George W. Bush. It's someone else who did it, not you. Then, once you feel all better, be sure to vote for the candidate who will tell you what you want to hear: we need to leave Iraq, or we need to stay there. It's all the same: seeds from the fruit of a poison tree of lies that will, themselves, bear lies tailored to your need for self-exoneration.

This is how the valence of Hegelian historical inevitability gets assigned, and the folly of self-deception cannot long be held at bay, certainly not this time, because the same force that makes corrupt any choice we now select in our dealings in the Middle East will one day become tangibly manifest in the fire and shrapnel of embittered terrorists who will unmercifully punish us just as we unmercifully butchered their ancestors and kin.

Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama can mitigate the inevitable: lies beget consequences, and those consequences are not only the superficial catastrophes of far away places we can keep at bay by hiding in our homeland.

The United States economy cannot now be saved from tribulation because no leader could be elected on a platform of truth about that which must be done. Neither can our United States of America as a nation of free people be saved, for it is already dead: freedom has become a commercial slogan in the unrelenting program of law enforcement run amok by fearful legislators whipped forward by those whose appetite for obedience by the people has become married to the unstoppable train of technological innovations that cynically thwart the simplicity of constitutional due process.

To the extent that an engine of systematic lies is the foulest of enemies of a free people, the United States government is, then, an enemy of the American people that was once collectively free; and to the extent that collective freedom exists only when each within that aggregate is free, this government of pervasive, metastatic lies is an enemy to each and every person who is free by natural law that transcends the particulars of time, place, and circumstance.

In passing, I note that this conclusion I herewith openly publish, even as it defiantly expresses my intention to freedom, at once definitionally serves the repressive state to the end of actionable claim against me. I have no harbor in the Constitution, for it is now subservient to what the highest court of the land calls "constitutional law," which is the body of that very same court's own rulings, which are mandatory precedent upon all lower courts in the land. Even if, by some oddity of case, the courts were to defend my right to speech, the federal legislature has both actively and tacitly given its permission to the President to do as he pleases in extra-judicial pursuit of "terrorism," however the government chooses to define it. Both pretenders to the throne of Empire have endorsed the wretched disposal of constitutional rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, yet their respective supporters refuse to see them as two faces of the same tin coin of authoritarianism ringing mightily while delivering nothing of value to the besieged Constitution and those it rightfully protects.

I am not afraid of this government, for I know it is the engine of empire dying before my mortal eyes. I need do no more than write and speak of its collapse, for it hastens its own death with each passing day, with each passing, more outlandish, more insistent lie.

I need only wait, write, and teach; and in that last modality of my death watch upon this wrongful and elderly monster whose name is Anathema, I shall prepare the young for the time that is to come that they may be not only prepared through revelation for a circumstance of awful tribulation, but knowing of why it has come, how it will proceed, and to what ends they must dedicate their learning and, indeed, their very spirits that they may continue on past the time when this government, of its own tragic destiny, has passed into sullen history, yet one more failed state of glorious ideals eviscerated by the consuming and all-destructive spiral of lies and their consequential burden of corrosive, suicidal distension.

And so I pause in the course of my own journey to the end of days to defy this government—nay, to challenge this government—to silence me. I dare this government to call me its enemy as I have, in this place for all to see, called it the enemy of my freedom.

Silence me lest I remain to my solemn task of shining a light down the darkling and now inexorable path that is the way to the cemetery of empire.

I wish only that the light I cast could illuminate for me that which lies beyond the graveyard, for I know that the better place—a bright place of learned hope and vigilance in freedom—exists, yet I know neither its form nor its time. That good place is there, but I cannot see it, so I must craft my hope of its good and great landscape within my soul, that place where lies cannot make permanent camp, that place my government long ago abandoned to the ill shadows of fleeting fortune and paltry powers that sovereigns so willingly substitute for a living spirit fed by the wellspring of a people unbridled in their freedom.

While hope is never enough, knowledge is abundance; and so, even as I sound the clarion call of the end of this history, I offer a horn of plenty to those who can steadfastly endure this government's crying shame of decadence in political oppression and economic misery in its last years and days. In caution, though, be forewarned: the wrath of generations to come will lay to waste the lives and deeds of us all for the disdain with which we dispensed with hope through action in the name of safety through surrender. Woe be our name as the truth we cannot see becomes the justice we shall suffer.

As both meek and magnificent promise, I give you this: the time of tribulation, bearing as it must the cruel twins of consequences and truths, will someday and inevitably pass; then all of us, both the living and the dead, shall once again be free.

Free we shall be until, of course, lies once again become empire and ignorant, self-serving people find life in the shadow of empire preferable to death in defiant rebellion.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.