Sometimes

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Sometimes

Sometimes,
it is the the greatest joy to be included,
appreciated,
and celebrated by a throng
bonded by shared ideals,
who immerse you
in their mass joy of identity.

And sometimes,
it is the bitterest of disappointments
to realize nobody has any interest
in who you are,
what you think,
and what you say,
that you are simply disappeared
from all human fellowship.

And then sometimes,
it can be the most amazing revelation
to find that what seemed like a solitary confinement
within socially unanimous rejection
was actually the purest freedom anyone had ever known,
the most profound experience of affirmation
the universe could ever bestow on an individual.

13 October 2016

Voting For Against

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Voting For Against

There’s a sucker born every minute, and they all vote for the lesser evil.

Bernie Madoff is in jail for life for running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded the rich. His colleagues running similar scams are free, rich and celebrated because they defraud the working and workless poor. From their legally protected offshore treasure chests they fund the lesser evilism of a rigged electoral system that keeps governments under control by corruption that shakes down the public to slop the troughs of the high rollers.

Election night is always a heartbreak for the old-timers who’ve seen the lesser evil scam cycle over and over again, and wish they could see it killed off before they die.

Election night is a big yawn to the nonchalant youth busy playing in their chill sandboxes without a thought to their unbroken futures as sucker carrion and cannon fodder.

Election night is an exciting drama to the vain shallow-minded selfish useful idiots who think what’s good for them is good for the country, and that either of those is offered by lesser evilism.

Today’s politicking is a furious clash between hot air and vapid prattle, devoid of truth while demurely united in criminality, to entrance the hollow-headed with a circus that spoofs attentiveness, so as to allow the hidden hand to continue stealing the public bread.

To be alert, compassionate and ethical is to resign yourself to being marooned in a moral wasteland on a lost planet.

My CO2 Automobile Emissions

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1) I have driven automobiles around the world 30 times.
2) Total distance is 750,000 miles.
3a) Speed was 2/3 of a circuit per year [1],
3b) or 16,667 miles/year (45 years),
3c) or 45.6… miles/day (45 years).
4a) Fuel used was 30,000 gallons of gasoline
4b) at 25 mpg (assumed).
5a) CO2 produced was 589,200 pounds [2],
5b) or 13,093.3… pounds/year, 45 years.
6) Number of travellers 1 to 5 (average ~2).
7) CO2/average traveller is 6,546.6… pound/year.
8) CO2/mile is 0.7856 pounds/mile.
9) Equivalent # US drivers/year, if use my rate of CO2 production = 143 million. [3]
10) Average # cars/trucks owned per Equivalent driver = 1.78. [4]

DATA:

[1] Circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles (rounded up to 25 kmile).

[2] “About 19.64 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) are produced from burning a gallon of gasoline that does not contain ethanol.” (US-EIA)

[3] US CO2 from autos and gasoline powered trucks is >50%, probably <66%, of the CO2 emissions from the entire transportation sector, which produces 26% of the total US emission of CO2 (2014, but similar since 1990). The total greenhouse gas emissions for the US (2014) is 6870 x 10^6 metric tons, and CO2 is 82% of that greenhouse gas total. (US-EPA). [1 metric ton (1000 kg) = 2204 pounds.] So:

a1) Total greenhouse gas/year = 6,870 million metric tonnes.
a2) Total greenhouse gas/year = 15,141,480 million pounds
(15.141 trillion pounds).

b1) Total CO2/year = 5633 million metric tonnes.
b2) Total CO2/year = 12,416,013 million pounds
(12.416 trillion pounds).

c1) Transportation CO2/year = 1465 million metric tonnes.
c2) Transportation CO2/year = 3,228,163 million pounds
(3.228 trillion pounds).

d1) Auto/truck CO2/year (@ 58%) = 849.5 million metric tonnes.
d2) Auto/truck CO2/year (@ 58%) = 1,872,334 million pounds
(1.872 trillion pounds).

[4] “According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics for 2012, there were 254,639,386 registered vehicles” in the U.S. (rounded up to 255 million) (wikipedia)

I Am Not Here

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I Am Not Here

Poetry is the first hideout of a romantic,
and the last refuge of a socialist.
In between
is a lifetime of discovery and disillusion.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The Sunday afternoon sunlight
of a San Francisco Bay Indian Summer
illuminating the honeyed ruby sweetness
of a glass of port
in a near-empty bistro relaxing
with honeyed saxophone sounds
is the dynamic stillpoint of the All,
consciousness of which is entirely mine
in all of humanity.

With each passing day
I am increasingly cloud-hidden
on the upper slopes of the unseen mountain
at the threshold of the Western Desert.
The berries up here are sweet,
ripened with age,
except for the bitter young ones,
plump and green.
I am eye-to-eye with eternity
even as I am of vanishing consequence.
On descent into the daylight below the mists,
into the hurly-burly of the human ferment,
I am enveloped by a protective invisibility
because ignorance is fragile,
and like the first sprouts of a seedling
needs protective shade against the withering sun.

Soon enough the port is drunk,
dusk has passed,
and in the foggy night chill
I set off once again up the mountain
to catch the dawn rays above the mists,
in solitude,
cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.

9 October 2016

Mediocrity Rules

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“There are hundreds, thousands of youths who enter upon the hard calling of the arts with extravagant hopes; but for the most part they come to terms with their mediocrity and find somewhere in life a niche where they can escape starvation.” — W. Somerset Maugham (in “The Bum”)

Most people are mediocrities, for by the very definitions of the words “exceptional” and “genius” how could it be otherwise? So, to secure their survival mediocrities gravitate into filling the many slots in bureaucracies of waste enshrining hierarchies of incompetence. This allows them sufficient anonymity to avoid being held responsible for their actions, which in any case are bureaucratically diluted to near inconsequentiality, and so they are insulated from harsh judgements based on their individual value to society.

Being a bureaucrat offers the opportunity to be a gatekeeper at some trivial level, and that in turn offers the excuse to puff up with self-importance, which is a poor substitute for the self-esteem needed for psychological survival. Since most of us are mediocrities, the bureaucratic sheltering of our aggrageted societal weakness is a form of compassionate socialism we must be resigned to accept.

As I sit in my favorite bistro and listen to the stupid self-satisfied babble of the lunching shallow-minded mediocrities obsessed with their microscopic concerns, I remind myself of the unavoidable necessity of our societal inefficiencies, lack of vision and achievement. All our exchanged bureaucratic praises and our nationalistic forms of self congratulation are charitably allowable falsities.

It would be wonderful, even revolutionary, if we could move beyond this maintenance of illusion for the comfort of mass mediocrity, but sadly we can’t, at least not now nor in the forseeable future. In fact, it seems most likely we will never achieve a higher level of social evolution that make possible the fullest development of individual human potential, as well as ensuring our species-wide survival and well-being, by stopping our self-inflicted wounding by capitalism, war and climate change.

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America’s Enslaving Freedoms

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America’s Enslaving Freedoms

The White people who came to the American continents and eventually established the many nations of the Western Hemisphere, including the United States of America, were united in their belief in three motivating principles:

1. They wanted the freedom to practice their religion, and to persecute those who did not,

2. They wanted the freedom to practice genocide of the native populations in order to gain real estate,

3. They wanted the freedom to practice slavery, both chattel slavery and wage slavery, to gain wealth.

In today’s United States, these three freedoms are somewhat tempered for political expediency, but their motivational cores remain as the essence of this nation’s attraction to immigrants from around the world.

The freedom of religion is an umbrella under which we gather our many forms of enjoying ignorance and being comforted by bigotry. Racism, anti-science irrationality, paternalism, sexism, child abuse, homophobia and traditional religious intolerance of all kinds are all enthusiastically maintained here.

The freedom to practice genocide is now a systematized slow-motion process of wealth-driven legality degrading and displacing depreciated populations to extract material advantages from those being impoverished. The combine of the banking, real estate and fossil fuel industries, and their many land-grab schemes for: gentrification, urban commercial development, large-scale industrialized agriculture, privatization of scenic areas, pipelines and natural resource extraction, all find their motivational root in this freedom of the wealthy to exclude.

The freedom to enslave remains as popular today as it has always been. Gaining the rewards from the unpaid and even forced labor of others is an enduring desirable among our species. Again, in today’s America the raw slavery of the past is difficult to practice on a grand scale, though many individuals do manage to be masters over their own hidden slavery operations (of economic as well as sexual slavery). The major slavery plantations serving USA owners today are the tragically vast private prison and slavery complex, and the internationally outsourced de facto slavery operations of pittance wage labor producing “low cost” (high profit) products for import to the USA.

One can easily see strong resonances of these three principles as the foundations of many US foreign policies, entanglements and alliances; with Israel and Saudi Arabia for example.

Most Americans adhere to these principles, even if they don’t realize it, because they are easily distracted shallow thinkers whom corporate media indoctrinates without difficulty. Our public political discourse is confined to the narrowest of ranges centered squarely in neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy. The grotesque fluff that passes for political debate, currently between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, is entirely about the inconsequential atmospherics that each presidential contender would prefer to exhibit were they to be appointed the manager of the existing, unchangeable and continuing neoliberal economic regime.

The purpose of the US corporate-owned government is to maintain the conditions that allow today’s corporate wealth-generating schemes to continue their extraction from the national and world common good. There is no room for the voice of wage-slave America in the political process imposed for the benefit of the wealthy. That was the bluntly obvious message, sent by the ownership class to wage-slave America, in the blocking of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Jill Stein and the Green Party valiantly carry on with the most popular yet least supported agenda for wage-slave Americans, but again, too many are imprisoned by their fear-based indoctrination.

Remaining faithful to learned delusions for enslavement is more comforting to most of the electorate than breaking out into a rebellious independence of logical thought, based on facts, that leads to politically disobedient actions. However, in 2016, the sheer odiousness of the leading presidential contenders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, has shredded so much of the camouflage hiding the naked reality of American capitalism, that it is impossible for any sane person to remain unaware of it. Some very optimistic observers are hopeful that this ‘pantsing’ of American neoliberalism will be the beginning of a collapse of wage-slave America’s support for both the Democratic and Republican parties. We have all seen:

1. The loutish honesty of Donald Trump in accurately expressing the attitudes of the American wealth elite; and

2. The smarmy manipulativeness and blatant dishonesty of Hillary Clinton, which has exposed the corruption of the government professionals serving the American wealth elite.

Donald Trump’s popular support has come at the expense of the viability of the Republican Party as a vehicle supporting the careerism of its professional politicians, because that support is a populist insurgency that overwhelmed the pros. By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s support is centered among the careerist professional politicians of the Democratic Party, and has come as a result of excluding the voice of the people, who in turn have lost enthusiasm for that party and its “first female president” candidate.

So now, the Trump-led Republican Party flounders with chaotically amateurish ebullience, while the Clinton-led Democratic Party is a tightly scripted flat tire. Will more of the electorate wake up, and move on? We can only hope.

Enjoy Life, Old Guy!

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Enjoy Life, Old Guy!

Don’t waste your time on self-pity,
go out and enjoy life.
Nobody cares you exist
beyond you paying them.
This is the way of the world.
Don’t waste time complaining about it,
don’t waste energy getting angry
at all your so-called friends,
and so-called family,
for being other than typical
self-absorbed human monkeys
focused on what they want to grab next.
Get in that little red sports car of yours
and go for a joy ride!
Fuck global warming,
nobody cares about it anyway
and never will,
even as Paradise dries out and burns up,
and the cinders of Hell freeze over.
Enjoy your wine and booze.
Your mind will love you for it
and never notice
how hard your heart pumps
or your liver strains,
but it would surely detest
cowering in a dark cave of fear.
Dying is inevitable
and death is not a tragedy,
but dying with regrets is.
And let’s be clear about love:
for most love is pure possession,
it is about being happy to have and to get.
Your legacy is zero,
don’t waste energy thinking about it.
Whatever money not siphoned off
to pay for your American-style death
will be squandered
by your grateful loving family.
All those fine books and precious papers
that you put such stock in
will be tossed out in a dumpster.
All that thoughtful advice
that you lavished on your children
will have long since been forgotten.
After all, they don’t pay attention to it now,
so why expect them to remember it
after you’re gone?
You were an envelope to genetic messages
that got sent and received long ago;
you’re done.
Face it,
everyone is so wrapped up in their lives
they can’t think of anything outside them.
At best,
mothers obsess about their children,
and for them people orbit that obsession,
from tight close orbits of manipulable utility,
to distant cometary ellipses of uselessness.
All you have now is consciousness,
a fascinating gift of temporary duration
which can be so exquisitely delightful;
and you have your self-respect,
entirely in your power to maintain.
What you do not have,
despite illusions to the contrary,
is any right to being appreciated,
to being respected,
to being noticed.
Do you wonder why suicide bombers volunteer?
Love you may get,
there are so many possessive monkeys
grabbing onto theirs
that two wanting possessives
may draw each other
mirrored as attractions.
But, don’t be a sucker
falling for the delusion of self-importance.
The cat will love you just as much
for the bits of grilled chicken tossed in its bowl,
as your family will
for the roof you hold over their heads
and the gold
you carpet the paths of their dreams with.
Console yourself to reality,
then, bypassing disappointment and anger,
move on to contentment
for the remainder of your indefinite term
in Paradise: the here and now.
Après moi, rien.

28 September 2016

Hillary versus the Bernie Bro

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Hillary versus the Bernie Bro

Hillary: Vote for me!

Bernie Bro: Why?

H: Because Trump is so terrible, and I’ll implement the platform Bernie Sanders made us adopt.

BB: You’ve got to be kidding. You run a bribery racket and can’t be trusted to keep any promise you haven’t been paid for.

H: You are so misinformed! I have explicitly said that I would implement the Democratic Party platform.

BB: You are guaranteed to play the public with lies and deception to get what you want, and have been paid for. That is the one constant in your life.

H: Look, you can be sure that whatever promises I break, anything I would do would be way better than anything Trump might do. No matter what, I’m better for you than Trump would be.

BB: There is no objective evidence for believing that. Since Trump is opposed by all professional Democrats, as well as most professional Republicans, it is unlikely, as President, he’s going to get much of anything done one way or the other. You, on the other hand, are supported by professional Democrats and many professional Republicans, so as president you would have a good chance of achieving your worst potential. Sorry, I’m voting for Jill.

H: How could you live with yourself, and face your friends, if you don’t vote for me and Trump wins?

BB: That’ll be easy. After finding out the kind of people that are nuts for you, nothing would please me more than to never again have anything to do with them.

H: You are deplorable.

BB: From you, a compliment. I can’t always vote for a winning candidate, but I will be able to vote in November and maintain my self-respect. Maybe someday the country will catch up, and maybe it won’t. But, I don’t have to sink down into your mud wallow with Trump.

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What They Stand For:

Hillary: The diversity of our faction in the corrupt elite exploiting the American working class is proof of our higher degree of morality and caring for the American public.

Trump: The freeing of the American working class to publicly express its various bigotries without shame is proof of our higher degree of honesty and caring for the American public.

Jill: People over profits, now and forever!

Johnson: No taxes! Even if extinction is required.

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How We Will Vote:

College educated people who don’t care how many brown people have to die, worldwide, to maintain them in their comforts will vote for Hillary Clinton.

People not college-educated, who don’t care how many brown people have to die, worldwide, to maintain them in their comforts will vote for Donald Trump.

People who do care about brown people dying worldwide to maintain Americans in their comforts, and want to prevent that and redefine “their comforts” around this principle, will vote for Jill Stein.

People who don’t want to pay taxes no matter what, and so don’t want the US government to spend money on anything, will vote for Gary Johnson.

A Love Supreme

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John William Coltrane (23 September 1926 - 17 July 1967)

John William Coltrane (23 September 1926 – 17 July 1967)

A Love Supreme

Coltrane is the angel God called upon
to blow the universe down its swingingest groove.
Music is the resonance of eternity in the transience of the moment.
But, to feel the living pulse of that essence —
holding all —
you have to hear the heart music —
the breath of God itself —
like Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven,
and yes, yes,
that earnest, pregnant resonance of living air —
Coltrane.
He is like a pool with a buried sun —
on diving deeper its clarity expands.
Explanation is deviation,
the embodiment is acceptance, experience, devotion,
mystical wonder,
an unknowing, humbling sainthood of art.
Man is the instrument of God,
and Coltrane is God’s dream of love for us
blown through a tenor sax.

23 September 2002

Civics 911

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Iraq War Protest SF

Civics 911

The election is a class war against the terror of democracy.
The people are the enemy of the state,
and corporate power is the state.
Hillary is the Joan-of-Arc of American parasites
(and foreign ones).
Trump is America’s response to being force-fed Hillary.
The American people are:
redundant labor,
a low-yield investment,
an inadequate market,
an impediment to economic efficiency.
It is true at least half of them are deplorable basket cases
of ignorance and bigotry,
while much of the other half are deplorable basket cases
of smugly hypocritical dishonesty and selfishness.
But, there it is,
the Janus faces of the American union.
The democratic socialist dreamers can fantasize
about truth and justice being the American way,
but there’s no money in that
so too few believe in it.
No, ours is an empire of stale bread crumbs
and grotesquely hokey circuses,
and every poor barely-working stiff is
monkey-in-the-middle
as well as a jeering lout in the encircling rabble,
shrieking in a delighted rage,
thumbing down on others
in a delusion of self-importance no one else ever notices.
Kill ‘em! Whoever they are.
Hail Caesar! Whoever you are.
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

14 September 2016