Political Hybrid

Why do we persist with this Left-Right dualism?I'm as guilty as anyone. Just finished this:http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?pid=303630
I love this woman and usually agree with most of what she says , but I reserve my caveats.
After years (decades) of the Right's accension and the deregulation, 'free-market' frenzy, it will take just as long to repair the damage. Massive investment in infrastructure, health and education is required... and the Neo-Fascists will fight to the death and srceam"communism!!!!". I agree wholeheartedly that we should begin to take our country back.
However, the Left is still milking the teat of the Right's sacred cow.
Cornucopian , Corporate 'Capitalism' and self censorship lest they get tarred with the ' Pinko" label.
Where is the dicussion of Peak Oil? where is the talk of dismantling the corporate state?
In my own experiance with entrepreneurial endeavors, it's the regulations that apply to the smallest of us as if we were Walmart that are a fundamental problem. For regulation to work it has to be enforced equally, but with wisdom. As an organic farmer, I was inspected and bothered about every damned detail. My gigantic competitors had lawyers and consultants and staffs to deal with this, as well as money for campaign contributions and lobbyists , and enough scale and market-share to set prices. Low prices worked for them, and against me in a world of stagnant wages and hidden inflation. The industry standards, arbitrarily set by the biggest players, not because it was better (it wasn't) but because it was one more straw on the backs of small, local growers. Standards for manure and compost handling in the national organic rules are next to impossible for small organic growers.


The point is, I'm all for regulation, and Free Enterprise, but we have to talk about how the Big Boys have stolen our means of taking care of ourself. How they have rewritten the law and the rules to outlaw self sufficiency and self-employment. There is no reason to coddle corporations at the expense of little, local business, unless you believe in Cornucopia.Efficiency is used to justify the rise of big business. No print is given to the idea of a finite world or uncommodified quality of life.
It's not just Farming...
I talk to local Democrats . When I talk about getting 'the government out of our business', they equate that with all the corporate 'deregulation' nonsense of the past 30 years. Of course, I am not Exxon Raytheon or Cargill. The big ones have been deregulated at our expense. We have been regulated into a corner where the entrepreneurial spirit has been starved out of us and we will line up for a 'job' at Mcdonald's.
Ther is some recessive gene in me that expresses itself in not being able to function in a corporate 'environment'. I'm too smart to ignore inefficiencies and stupid, wasteful, low-quality ways of doing things.
This means trouble in corpworld where one is expected to do as one's told. This has infected what 'small' enterprise still exists.I'm speaking from experience in food-service. Quality goes out the back door in order to 'compete' w/ the giants.One has to cheat at every opportunity. And go into massive debt.
This is unsustainable and need to be adressed , where is this argument from the Left?
As usual, objective reality and the mythical reality are diametrically opposed.
The myth says that quality wins in the marketplace.
With the current upheavals on Wall street, does anyone truly believe this?

Perhaps in the long run. But for too long, malfeasance and avarice and willful denial has won, at the expense of all our quality of life.

On being Bipolar...

Manic Depression sucks!It does explain a lot about my life,tho.
Sucks the most when I'm in a mental frenzy and can't walk from the damned arthritis. When I can go putter around in the barn, or whatever , it's alright. But when I'm stuck in my chair, or (worse) in bed,and there's crap on tv, and I can't read when i'm manic, ....well, it just sucks.
I've been trying to tell myself that I'm 'allergic' to alcohol. It affects me differently than anyone else I've ever known. I surmise that I've been self medicating all these years when I was on my way up into mania. I'll stay up as long as there's alcohol available!!
Real jekyll and hyde.
I've managed to get it down to once a week, or even 2; but it's very hard. I prefer Weed, but it's so hard to find.... everyone has been "compromised" by law enforcement.

I've resisted medication.
I have a PDR in my library, and am an information junkie, and don't trust Big Pharma as far as I can throw them... "Deregulation" and all....
Frankly, the drugs indicted look worse than the illness. I'm just not ready to go there.
I've joined a Webring(upper right, I think) in the hopes that someone out in the ether will see this. It gets dicouraging shouting down a well. I know I bitch and moan a lot., but I'd still like to be heard. .

The variety of Bipolar I have, as near as my shrink and I can tell, is rapid cycling. Seems like the " garbage-can" diagnosis to me, where they put you when you don't fit anywhere else. It figures, Like I've said, I'm an anomaly.

Any way, thanks for the forum and howdy-do to y'all on the ring...


"Life is about failing at greater and greater things."_ Goethe

on being pro-dope in wingnutland...

When I was in 5th grade, they started in with the srary stories about drugs, including Pot. Images of addled, violent miscreants competed in my mind with Jack Kerouac's road buddies and the Beatles. After 5 years and further reading, I smoked my 1st joint. Not scary at all.(!) Could it be that They lied?!
Research confirmed that they did, or at least cherry-picked the information.My Mom was attending a well known CJ college(for Art...) at this time, so I utilised their extensive section on drugs in the library. Clinical studies, galore.

Conclusion: lies. And about more than just Pot. Halucinogens, it turned out, could be utilised to expand one's mind, if used properly and with care.
What a world opened up to me in those days.
This was also what got me on my skeptical track. If they would lie, repeatedly, about something as relatively harmless as Pot, what else would they lie about? I haven't trusted gooberment, or any other establishment organ, since.
I know most of my posts end up as an anti-rightwing screed....
But the sky IS blue...no matter how many people they put in jail for saying it.
I've come around to the belief that the whole War on Drugs is a scam, a controll mechanism.It's designed to divide us, make us fearful of the other, and thus allow the PTB more power over us. The cops make lots of money off this ruse, and lobby hard to escalate it. I've seen it bandied about that the PTB is actually making $ from selling dope, laundering $, etc. It is curious that wherever we 'pacify' turns into an opium farm,no?
Just another example of the authoritarian's War on Reality.
Who you gonna believe, your Leaders, or your lying eyes?
I consider this long, failed "effort" like a practice run for the new War on Terror. A new, equally nonexistant "enemy" that we are to FEAR. And because of that FEAR, we willingly give up what's left of our sovereignty to those who would Rule.

"What luck for the rulers, that men do not think."- Adolf Hitler.

Sex,Ignorance and Hysteria.

So, let me first get the "closet" part over with... I'm Bisexual. I lust after women, but am opportunistic about men. I consider Try-sexual to be a good , underutilised descriptor.
Whew!
Our culture is sick.

We don't say a word to our kids about anything sexual till they're 20, if at all, then condemn them for finding out on their own. The Church forbids priests an approved outlet for what is ,arguably, God's greatest gift, and then wonders why they resort to sordid sex with minors. We rain down judgement on masturbation, and sex education, and nudity, and premarital sex; mystify and cloud the whole subject, then wonder why we have rapists and pdophiles and all the other sexual predatory behaviour.

A 4000 year old book of unknown authorship makes vague allusions to various sexual practices and we base our law, mores, and post-enlightenment social constructs on it.
Sex is, biologically, the "Prime Directive". It is a part of being Human. To deny our own Nature is to invite disaster and hysteria.
The Right (again, with them...) has driven us back to the bad old days. Ignorance, fear and hatred rule the day.Their own fear and guilt are projected onto society as a whole and God help those who don't subscribe to their narrow world view.
Gay marriage will, somehow, in their eyes, lead to pedophilia and bestiality and the demise of marriage, itself.(!) Their methods of repression and enforced ignorance sure seem to be working on those fronts.Look around. Perhaps it's time we tried another approach.
Perhaps we should educate kids, whenever they become interested, about the facts of life...
That masturbation is safe sex and a good way to get to know about one's body..That sex can lead to pregnancy and STD's and that there are ways to prevent both of these.That the Human body is beautiful in all it's variety and love and affection take many forms...

Perhaps we could "legalise" and "destigmatise" consenual behaviour between adults...Like the Pagan Imperative:"Harming none, Do as thou wilt."

I'm sick of the moralising, hypocritical posturing. This is a major reason I ultimately rejected Christianity...
I couldn't believe in a God that would ,presumeably, create me as I am, and turn around and condemn me for being as I am.
War , Sex and Drugs are the biggest businesses on the planet. It's who we are.Maybe, if we softened up a bit on the latter two, we would have less of the former.( I'll get onto Dope later...)
Something called the Dove foundation called me out of the blue.Wanted my support to "fix" tv.I said great!
Then they started in about sex and nudity....and profanity. I told them I thought it was stupid to excise the word"fuck", a womens breast, or nonpornographic representations of consensual lovemaking and leave in images of folks getting cut in half with machine guns!
They hung up on me.
Wasn't what they wanted to hear, I guess.

preacher

So Obama's preacher got him in hot water with his 'sermons' about us foreign policy and it's consequences.Obama is, of course, all over it, rejecting, denouncing, condemning. The MSM consensus seems to be that this is an 'extremist',"radical' opinion. They just can't get their head around how anyone who doesn't hate america could believe that 9-11 ,etc. could be a result of our imperialist meddling in other people's business.
I have lots of problems with this. For one, it is a sacred tradition in this country to call out our government whenever it behaves badly.They are supposed to be our servants and should be held accountable and made to answer such important charges.
For another, it is no secret that the CIA, et al, have been busy , for 60+ years, doing horrible things in our name. Coups, assasinations, kidnapping, fomenting revolution, subverting Democracy , all over the world.And theres the 'soft' power, employed most recently by Clinton, thru the IMF, WTO, etc.... ruining economies of countries that don't roll over for us corporations.

And yet, in America, we can't discuss this? The lunatics and warmongers get a free pass?
On 9-11-01, once I realised what was happening, the first thing to enter my mind was that this was retaliation for our CorpGov's meddling around the world. " chickens coming home to roost..."
The right wing has so poisoned the American mind that we can no longer think!(see alternet, sara robinson has a great series on how they did it...)
It's just like the 'discussion' about Israel.( Let me say, 1st, that I have roots in Bohemian Jewdom.) When someone, like me, now, calls a spade a spade, and says that the Israelis are behaving like Nazi's, suddenly I'm an antisemite!
It doesn't matter one whit if it's objectively true. Even Jimmy Carter was eviscerated for speaking the plain truth. The list is long... Ward Churchill, Chomsky, etc.etc.
I'll go even further and say that it looks to me that at least elements of our government perpetrated 9-11.(Heresy!) This is where the facts and inconsistencies lead me and I am unapologetic.
Bin Laden was , after all, a CIA asset in Afghanistan against the Russians.
It becomes increasingly difficult to determine the shape of the world as ideology trumps reason and the water is systematically muddied and any dissent is condemned as treason. We are expected to be turnips... falling anew off the truck each day, into a brand new world in which what has gone before is what they tell us has gone before. A clean slate.A blank page. No thought, no memory, and no hope.

crashing,finally...

i've reached a new low . i love everything chris cornell has hever done....
boujoulais? red wine. puking out the window.
totaly alone in my mind.
have i done this to myself?
could it be that i need ......others?
where should i find them??
feels like i'm too strange.

and i am a strange one.
when the shit hits the proverbial fan, i expect the ,litteral, pitch-forks and torches.....
i expect them to come for me, eventually...
cassandra in a coal mine...
serpents licked my eyes....
and i'm cursed in that noone wants to hear about the END of their most comfortable life....

On being a Freak

I've been a strange duck for my whole life. My preferred words are 'freak' and 'anomaly', depending on context.I was born unusually intelligent. I could read at 3 years and have found I have a high retention rate. I rarely forget something I've read. I can be absentminded, thinking about things. This seems to be percieved as aloofness.
It's hard to be smart in America, today. Texas, at least. I was dissapointed with higher ed. Where I had expected a Salon-type environment I found the two extremes of 1) balls-to-the-wall partying and 2)narrow, career-track grubbing w/ facile 'net-working'. These two overlapped, somewhat, but overall university was a gigantic disappointment. Some part of this , I think, was due to choice of schools; some due to the times. High-school with ashtrays is how I've characterised my college experience.
Moved to Austin after college, and it's still the only city I would even consider moving to, short of Paris.
Still, I couldn't find the intellectual things I was looking for. Expectations were, perhaps, too high.
The press of humanity grew oppressive and I seized the opportunity to get out , into the Wilderness.
Over all, it has been a positive thing... meeting my wife, having kids, and being so close to Nature. But there is definitely something missing.
I am a lonely, cynical bastard. I am filled with contempt for most folks I know, and that seems like a rational position. My wife says I'm too hard on folks, that I expect too much, that it's unrealistic to expect anyone out here to be intellectual or open-minded.
Perhaps she's right.
But it doesn't help with the isolation.I plunged ,headlong, into the society I found. My honesty and forthrightness were met with either blank, empty looks or, more rarely, outright contempt. I was rumored to be some kind of cult-leader.(!) All for being unorthodox and thinking for myself.
I think that part of this can be attributed to the times, the mood today. But most of it is a long-term trend of anti-intellectualism. From where I stand, folks just don't like to think. The local library, tho it's remarkably comprehensive is it's variety of materials, is used for access to the latest Nora Roberts or Dean Koontz. Nothing wrong with that, that's not my point.It's that noone I know seems interested in understanding the world they live in.And that's what drives me. I've encountered no curiosity , no critical judgement.
It bothers me to no end to have noone to discuss things with, without falling into superstitious certainty or uncritical acceptance of official culture.
I've always been a lurker on the Web. I retain some hope for this and other fora; but so far this looks like just a fancy way of talking to myself. Do I offend? It is not my intention.