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The Pentagong Show
United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Plumbing Impeachment's Depths.


Watching the ongoing circus, I can't, oh please forgive me, help but feel a spasm of pity, a twinge of sympathy for the piƱata in the Casa Blanca as he suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, however self-inflicted they may be. If one pricks even a prick, does he not bleed?

While his fawning base accepts him as the champion of anti-corruption, do they really forget that he has  always craved the spotlight, that even as a young man he barely concealed the profound corruption under the freshness of his early years? Under the first down of adolescence, he was worm-eaten to the heart; he was the fruit which contained only dust. In his young and flabby body, never hardened by the rigors of sport, there stirred only a soul as old as Saturn - a soul as incurably unhappy as any soul had ever been. This should leave us terrified, as it is enough to give one vertigo to peer into the black hole of his empty existence. Your griefs and mine are nothing in comparison. He cannot rest day or night; and like a heliotrope in a cellar, he twists and turns, writhing toward a sun he cannot see, a radiance he cannot feel. He is one of those men whose soul is seared, having not been steeped in the waters of adversity before it was conjoined to his body, tormented by the conviction that he once had wings, but now has only leaden feet. Doomed to the knowledge that he has never been nor ever will be passionately loved, he has sometimes inspired in me such a pity and interest that I could easily adopt a tone and manner which display an understanding enough to delude. Hence do I understand his need to surround himself with sycophants that play their part with the skill of the consummate actress; bright and melancholy or sensitive and voluptuous, they feign anxieties and admiration, shed false tears, summon to their lips artificial smiles and ferret out for him the mannequins of love he needs so he can truly believe all the wrong is on the other side, and thus ever spares himself of ever feeling any remorse.

There are none in his circle who dare to wield the pin that will prick his inflated balloon and let the wind out of of his plasticized persona, explaining what to many is the mystery of the fragile ego that even when wielding the world's sharpest of swords with the deadliest intention on the weakest of enemies, is yet injured to the quick by the slightest of stings from the tiniest needle.

 Nothing depraves you like not being loved.

So do I smile in sardonic amusement at the impeachment circus when I reflect how it has hardened our perspective. Before I was an interesting outsider. Now, I am a luckless dog. Before I was a lone voice in the wilderness, now I am drowned and ignored in an overcrowded chorus. No invalid has ever been more unpleasantly jostled out of their self-compassion. It is difficult to accustom myself to the new position all at once; I had begun to lose the faculty for sympathizing with others' griefs. It is hard to realize in all this brouhaha that my own superfluous life has been exposed as being entirely negligible and scarcely anyone's concern but my own. In this colossal circus, with its PT Barrnumb's ringmaster, who can stop to consider a lone and useless voice? Am I not but another comfortable parasite? And, I once again ask your forgiveness, an egotist to boot?

This Reality Show is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive light upon everyone's mind and character and publishing it on social Media for everyone to see. And the consequences to many folk has been a keen personal disappointment, as we ignoble persons had thought we were better than we really are.  We scarcely anticipated that the Trumpman Show was going to discover for us how our emotions are so despicably small by comparison, or our hearts so riddled with selfish motives. In the wild race for security in these amoral times both men and women have all been driving so close to the shoulder that our eyes have been too glued to the road to be able to spare a moment's thought for others; bereavement has brought bitterness and any modicum of social security, indifference.

 Yet not even the debates have brought any awareness of how pathetically we still cling to fragments of the old regime that has already passed  - like shipwrecked sailors we clutch bits of floating wreckage, deaf to the thunder of our world being smashed to pieces yet turning pricked-up ears to newspaper gossip while garnering Facebook "likes", still coveting our cherished aims -wealth, celebrity, success - while in spite of everything grabbing for the golden ring while the heavens fall; revolving like tattered windmills in a devastated landscape. We are all the same case: I type out my blog, and watch the telly in the evening, and old ladies still read the gossip columns while ignoring the headlines and news. We look like a nest of frightened ants scurrying over each other in panic when someone lifts the stone.

That leaves me wondering if perhaps our sympathy for ourselves hasn't become so unfailing that we don't deserve anybody else's. Yet, is it not just as much how it's been transmogrified by the process of being aired like dirty  laundry in a polluted environment? This blog, for example, I believe gives the impression that I behave in public far worse than I actually do. Whereas herein I let myself go with unrestrained rants, in actual life I rein myself in to such an extent I am almost another person. Would you believe it, my acquaintances say I am full of quick sympathy with others and extraordinary cheerfulness, even gay, with, if anything, too much of a tendency to see the good in others where they insist none exists. It almost seems I lead a double life: with most people I pass myself off as a complaisant, amiable, even mealy-mouthed creature. While here, I stand revealed as a contemptuous, arrogant malcontent. It's as though my life has left me embittered, with the crabbed temper of the disappointed man, whereas I feel I'm rather unassuming, affable, diffident - even humorous. It is only the manner in which the voices of fools are amplified and apparently taken seriously that have me becoming insolent, aggressive, and self-declamatory, pouring out the acid sentiment  of a vitriol thrower driven by revenge, before I can let myself become quiescent. It seems like it's my self-appointed duty because others are too constrained by their busy schedules to ferret out and publish the facts that lie behind the lies. Yet, I can't seem to decide which elicits the more helpless feeling: to sit and let the distortions pass uncommented on, or sitting and pounding away at my keyboard watching circumstances pounding away at my malleable character and shaping it wrongly.

Or perhaps not. For even well into adulthood I maintained a rather naive confidence in the goodness of mankind, long after I realized that of all the virtues, kindness was the hardest to be found. Yet I remained, if not an optimist, at least rather sanguine about men and women, believing them to be, along with myself, far better than they actually are. I haven't really crushed this illusion even now. I even still rub my eyes in disbelief that we are in fact so dastardly hypocritical, such ingenious self-deceivers.

It's why I can't quite grasp some of the surprising rhetoric of those who consider themselves 'good ' people at the antics of our PT. A consummate liar, a thief, a scam artist and serial bankrupt, he would be hard-pressed to surprise me by any of the things he has done, while the feigned self-serving ad-funded outrage at his outrages is itself outrageous and far more bitterly disappointing as it leaves neglected real problems that are instead left to fester, with real consequences, while the critics grow rich on the perfidy they expose while hiding their own behind mAdmen finance.

We are all become so cold, so aloof, so self-centered even to our warmest friends. Men of piety love god, but their love for each other is most often as tepid as used bath water, their affections as frosted as an Englishman's reserve. As for myself, I hesitate in showing affection as if I were not sure of it. I am afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out I've been undercut, taken advantage of, fooled into a foolish dotage, charmed by a charlatan. My analytical mind dissecting everyone except those most deserving of it, so it's those I love who receive the brunt of my suspicion, my having been so often stung to the quick. Besides, such yearning only makes me feel foolish. Only the rich or the beautiful are so fortunate as to be amorous without being ludicrous and pitiful.

All of which leaves me to suspect that some time ago, somewhere in my life, I have been obscurely loved by some humble heart which I misunderstood or broke; that somehow, inexplicably, I myself was the ideal of somebody else, the pole of a suffering soul, the dream of a night and the thought of a day. If I had looked at my feet, I wonder if I would have seen some beautiful admirer yearning for a glance, a touch, any acknowledgement of their existence or return of their affection. I went about raising my eyes to heaven, longing to gather the stars that escaped me, while disdaining to pick the soul abloom with affection that was opening its heart to me only to have me trod it down into the earth. I shudder with the realization that I have made terrible mistakes; asking of love something other than love, something love could not give. I have forgotten that love is naked, I have failed to understand the meaning of that magnificent emotion. Instead I have expected of it robes of splendor, feathers and jewels, sublime intelligence, knowledge; I've sought in it for poetry, beauty, youth, even  power; everything, in short, that it is not. Love can only offer itself, and whomsoever wants to draw something else from it does not deserve to be loved.

 And nothing depraves you like not being loved.

While nothing assures that you won't be as not having the capacity, or the willingness, to extend that most cherished of emotions to another.

In which regard I can hardly find my own past behavior unimpeachable.












Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Braking News: CARS Can Cause Climate Change! Wow.


The Puffpiecing  Host.


In a breath-taking report in the Huffing-tons-of-carbon news, it's been revealed that,

 "the automobile has become one of the greatest challenges to solving climate change."!

Hot Damn! What crack reporting! OMG! You mean the ongoing, organized fracturing of the entire plate of the North American craton isn't just being undertaken for the sake of Japanese-style, make-busy let's pretend the economy isn't just for the enrichment of the few and the destruction of the many? No indeedy. This time, unlike in 2008, the way we are being set up will leave the US electorate trapped in a web of their own construction. Much like the mortgage scam run by the Fed and the College tuition trap Sallie Mae ensnares our most vulnerable, years before they can legally buy their own drinks, the driving public has been saddled with auto loans for vehicles they will not have the ability to either drive or sell before the note, which they will still be liable for, has been paid off. 

But then again, rereading that statement reveals it's maybe not such cracker-jack reporting:

"the automobile has become one of the greatest challenges"?

Really? Where've ya been?

The auto mobile has always been not "one of" the greatest challenges, but THE greatest challenge, the one that tippered Gore into the losing column in 2000 in favor of yet another oil-connected Bush and the Texas mafia that first ran him and then both his presidency and the economy right into the ground. No one knew the Lay of the land like the Bush junta. Today we are till held hostage to the largest boondoggle of the 21'st century, the one Trump is currently using to solidify support in the so-called (corn)bread basket where corn-for-ethanol program slathers all those tax dollars the Grover Norquislings of the world insist they are against spending. Every department in the Federal government caters to and craters to the automobile industry's demands. Even when those industries are in other countries, paving the way for US tax dollars to be extorted to pay for VW plants in the south where they manufactured, and would still be manufacturing if they hadn't been caught, portable gas chambers (a German specialty) that were filling their customers' lungs with toxins their tests were designed to tell them weren't there. Now, a few years and a piddling fine later, and they're back in business, performing who-knows-what crimes on an unsuspecting public today.

And that's just only one of many. The machines invented in the 19'th century and that enabled the mechanized militarization and razing of the planet in the 20'th century are basically the same machines in the 21'st:

Except they're BIGGER, and therefore Thirstier, they're more dangerous, their drivers more aggressive and, cosseted as they are in their foamed, e-machine, GPS-enabled, internet-providing portable living rooms, less attentive to the threat they pose to those outside their encapsulated Jetson-like carapace, running down pedestrians and cyclists, of all sorts, motorcyclists included, at an increasing and alarming rate.

We don't care, we don't have to, we're driven.

So, I'm sorry, you can go around huffing and puffing all you want, but you can't say it is ONE of the greatest challenges when it is THE greatest challenge, you can't say it has BECOME the greatest challenge, when that's what it's always been, and you can't say it has anything to do with solving climate change when it is the number one CAUSE of climate change; but mostly, you can't entitle an article, "The Democrats baffling blind-spot ... ", while demonstrating your own cluelessness on the same subject. And that's only one sentence, and we've not even tackled the most ridiculous word in that sentence.

There is no "challenge", there is only capitulation. The US is pulling out of the Paris Agreements specifically because US citizens will consciously, willingly, gleefully, even, stand and watch the entire country get flooded, its forests burnt to a crisp, its future utterly destroyed, rather than admit it has anything to do with THEM. And the rest of the world, well, for Americans, it simply has no relevance, even those parts of it, such as right now in Afghanistan, you know that country with which the US is at War, has been at War for more than 15 years, pouring trillions of dollars into ITS economy, yet which country 85% of the US war-mongering public would be unable to find on a globe.

It may have been forgotten or simply a forgone conclusion, but the reason we are in Afghanistan, or the Middle East at all, is oil. That is, for fuel to power our cars. Allied with the medieval, conservative, so-called "kingdom" of Bone-Sawdi Arabia, the land that spawned Bin Laden and the mujahadeen to fight in oh yeah, Afghanistan, all through the Reagan/Bush eighties, was all for OIL, all to enable the powering, paving, manufacture of and wasteful use of the auto mobile such that we now have trapped ourselves in an economy that uses our own and the rest of the worlds' reserves not to power our industrial base, but to drive/chauffeur ourselves around in ever-increasingly luxurious style while employed at increasingly make-work employment.

And that was just the beginning of the planned ramp-up in the American Car-nage to be inflicted on the world's less-militarized zones. In fact, it is interesting to note that it is only in terms of climate change that they Huff and puff. The car has been at the center of US geopolitical stratagems and military deployments for at least two generations, it is the reason we are the Bone Sawdis' closest ally:

 "I'd have taken the OIL" ... "I'll just take the oil!"

is the mantra that got the Trumplestiltskin into the oral office. It is the reason that Ellen DeGeneres can unapologetically be best buddies with the mass murderer and War Criminal, GW Bush. Because we knew then what we have forgotten today. The wars on Iraq had nothing to do with WMD and  everything to do with keeping their oil in the ground, and the current president has followed the exact same strategy in Iran: to keep oil prices from falling to rock bottom, illegally sanction a country that has done nothing to us ...  nothing ... in order to ensure a market for the weak substitute derived from fracturing: gas-liquid condensates, which are not in fact oil. They are useless as transport fuels, so must be dumped on the fungible oil market. (Leading up to the US peak in conventional oil production, around 2005, this word, "fungible," was bandied about as though everyone knew what it meant, although no one I knew had a clue as to its meaning. You wouldn't have noticed, but because I have this obsession with the oil/car/ military nexus running the country, I have. And what I've noticed is the complete disappearance of the word, because now the world's # 1 oil producer (Lol!) delivers a product that is not fungible, and cannot in fact be processed in the heart of America's oil industry, but must be shipped to refineries in other pats of the world instead ... at great cost, both financially and environmentally).

Saudi Arabia, however, the homeland of the well-connected Bin Ladens, those closest of friends to the Bush family, whose citizens, despite being the most watched over and threatened with decapitation of all the world's polities, are the ones who bombed the WTC to a cinder, instigating the still-rampaging "Endless wars" of which the current President bewails, neglecting, with nary an MSNBC pundit bothering to point it out, to connect those wars to the Republican administrations whose policies spawned and waged them.

ALL for oil, which translates, if you care to look, which the Huff apparently doesn't, into fueling America's dream machines' past, present and increasingly destuctive, future (electric or not).

Yet it's climate change you think will awaken US drivers to their perfidy, when the murderous rampages the US government has embroiled our military in around the globe provides not the slightest twinge of conscience as we turn that key in the ignition every day? Seriously? Something about which the country, as evinced by this article, is in denial about, will change behavior when the actual disintegration of one country after the other, and the support of criminal regimes, for as long as they hand over their energy resources to US transnationals, have had no effect whatsoever, but the theorized prospect of a couple of degrees rise in global temperatures will? That doesn't say much for one's view of the American people, does it? It may be accurate, yes, but it's not a very charitable one.

Next the article states that our own International Energy Agency reported that America’s oil use was rising more quickly than any other nation. In 2016, (and the foot on the accelerator has only gotten heavier ever since) the average American drove 1,300 more miles than they did in 1992 (That was the year of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), btw, on which the useless international treaty of  1997, referred to as the Kyoto Protocol, is based. That's more than 25 years ago, so no Exxon to use as your scapegoat here: We knew.... Like cigarette smoking, we knew; we merely pretended we didn't. That worked so well, why not just try it again?) 

Every advance in fuel economy has been wiped out not only from the concomitant increase in miles driven, but accentuated by substantially bigger cars, and by burning Bush-sponsored and Trump-supported diluted gas to fuel them (long before this Trumpette sabotaged any pollution controls). In fact, as the lack of controls starts to impact those areas where the most drivers are on the road, such lack may actually be the only devise left to stop the extraordinarily fuelish behavior of the US polity. But in reality, that is hardly likely to matter, as the resultant oxygen-depleted, CO2-enriched air we must then breathe impacts those not driving far worse.

Poisoning their own offspring, leaving them in the lurch, destroying their future while saddling them with unpayable debt, is the US Government Guide to Childcare that every US parent follows religiously. Vaccines? NEVER! Now get in the car seat so I can drive to work and forget you even exist until I come out and find you dead from neglect. (Every parent could simply put their cell phone in the same seat with their offspring: they may forget their child, but they won't forget their phone. The reason this stratagem won't work? Parents fear they would miss a call, and so won't leave their phone where it can't be accessed while they're driving ... never mind that it's illegal. The fifty or so parents who, this summer alone, left their children to die an excruciatingly horrible death would have been penalized more for texting-while-driving than they got penalized for causing the death of their child. It is, after all their child, so big deal, right?

Continuing on:

"And yet, no prominent Democrats have proposed policies to reverse this trend."

 Lol again. Au Contraire: turning the Automobile manufacturing industry into a GSE (which is what Obama basically did, claiming the industry is as TBTF as the banking and insurance "industries", here in our Free-For-All enterprise system, is where political connections, military contracts, and financial defalcations, not honest accounting and profitability, determine which Corponationals remain in business).

Every major industrial country in the world, and none more so than the U, hands out large sums from the public purse to keep the cars rolling down those assembly lines, without which their economies would crater, their unemployment rates skyrocket, their tax receipts dwindle, and their balance-of-payments go haywire.

Far from reversing those trends, as the article's own statistics, as cited above, point out, such knowledge has only accelerated them. Since that 1992 UNFCCC Convention, the burning up and incinerating of every fossil fuel on the planet has not only shown no "proposed policies to reverse this trend" but has contrarily had several policies enacted that have been specifically designed to accelerate that trend.

"It’s a real blind spot.”

That's what they conclude.

But  it's a bare-faced lie. It's not a "blind spot" when you can see it and choose to pretend you don't: that's psychosis. Not only is not not a "real" blind spot, it isn't a blind spot at all. It's a mule-headed refusal by the citizenry to face facts; for politicians, it's an absolute necessity to pretend they're blind to it if they wish to get re-elected. (Just ask Al Gore). What the Dems know that the Huff pretends not to, is that Americans' attitude on this subject is intractable. You think Guns create strife? Start talking about limiting driving, and you'll see how many guns Americans really own, as they start pulling them out. The automobile has brought us to this juncture, and it will drive us right over the cliff, but what a joy ride, right?

But what's an article about a problem if you don't propose solutions? So they Huff one out:

"Simply move closer to jobs, services and shopping."

 Of COURSE! What idiots we are to not have thought of that.

Oh, wait ... thanks to the generations-long Fed-manipulation of the mortgage market, it is impossible to move to any of the country's cities that have transit, because the disconnect between wages and property values, brought about by so much Fed-manipulation of the economy, housing prices are forced up to nosebleed levels, while trillions of dollars sits idly on the Fed's books propping up those prices with MBS's purchased for that specific purpose: to keep the bubble-inflated real estate values paid during the financial mania from ever coming down to reality (ie, keeping housing prices and housing's value from the reconciliation they are in such desperate need of), keeping them artificially high and making it impossible for workers to ever even contemplate the possibility of living anywhere near where they have to work. Consequently, workers in the cities, where the jobs are darling, have no option: they are FORCED to locate an hour, sometimes two hours, away from their  place of employment, and, there being no mass transit in most of the country, that leaves them having to Drive to thrive.

"The most obvious explanation for Democrats’ four-wheeled "blind spot" is that reducing car use is politically unpopular".

Wrong: it's political suicide. Suburban women are not going to be stranded: they will turn on the Dems like mad dogs and rip them to shreds. Women, the font of human creation, are quite immune to all talk of reducing their carbon footprints. Bigger and bigger SUV's are in their sites, the damage they wreak be damned. Used to being kept, coddled, and catered to, the center of which entails automobility, they will give up their car keys only when they're wrested from their cold, dead hands.

So while they may Huff about their bafflement regarding the Dems ... all their brouhaha about Trump's withdrawal from the climate accords was exactly that ... a tempest in a teapot, as they have exactly zero intention of speaking truth to power, because, in a Democracy, at least the way I was taught, Power resides in the people. And "the people" will crush your face in the dirt at the mere suggestion that you'll take way or curtail access to their car or the cheap (very expensive to the rest of mankind who can't or won't drive) fuel needed to power them.

This failure is so monumental, that if liberal democracy is in fact the end of history, as was so arrogantly trumpeted in the nineties, then it will indeed bring about not just the end of history: its only promise now is that it'll leave us no future; provide us no hope; leave us no world. But at least then there'll be plenty of parking spaces.