A Montana wedgy

The above ad, timed for maximum impact on the Montana primary, is as cynical a maneuver as I have seen in politics, and is nauseating. It’s pure wedge, the crass emotionalism so blatant that it gives me goose bumps. John Walsh is about as inspiring as Major Frank Burns, and at least as deep. The fake sincerity he projects is enough to qualify him for an AVN award.

The Montana Democratic Party is deeply corrupt, and has managed to hold on to the governorship and senate seats due to sleazy trickery, dark money and the apparent ineptitude of its Republican counter-party. But then think about it: For all the years he held office there, former Senator Max Baucus only encountered one smart and well-financed opponent, Larry Williams, and dispatched of him with typical deceit and treachery, using a last-minute photo of him in college beads. He used a similar tactic against opponent Mike Taylor in 2002, with a homophobic attack that paralyzed his opponent. In campaigning, Baucus had no moral bottom. It’s how the Montana Democrat Party rolls.

But not this time, I think. Walsh is a tired man, uninspiring, military through and through, devoid of original thought and accustomed to doing as others command without reflex. (Even as I write that, I realize that Baucus held that seat for thirty years. I am swallowing hard on my words! Anything is possible in Montana.) His essential moral fatigue and intellectual shallowness comes across in the campaign images – if I can see through him, surely others will too. And that means that in 2015 Montana will again have a Republican senator, and Montana bloggers will again pay attention to an elected official after an election.

I ran across a pithy Mencken quote that adequately summarizes Walsh, below the fold.
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Everything we know is wrong

imageMaybe it is just the way of the world, the manner in which power manifests itself to us, its tentacles reaching into every aspect of our lives.

  • As I have learned in my lifetime, if we want to know what is true in our everyday political lives, we must avoid journalists. They are required to lie for their living.
  • If we want to know what is true about the products we buy, we must avoid advertisers. They are required to lie for their living.
  • If we want to know what is true about our history, we must avoid historians, who are only ‘credible’ to the degree that they dress up scoundrels as saviors and villains as heroes. They are required to lie for their living.
  • If we want an education, we must avoid our schools, whose function is quite the opposite, to dumb us down and prepare us for eking out mundane existences, steeped in the lies of journalism, advertising and history, sans curiosity.
  • And, as I have known for some years and is finally coming out in the mainstream, if we want to be healthy, we must avoid food corporations, their products, their scientists, and professional nutritionists. Our children are not just obese. They are being poisoned and are very sick.

Our prison of lies

Gidget goes to Hanoi
Gidget goes to Hanoi
My reading these days, like my thinking in general, is unfocused. I find it hard to care too much about anything.

But a common theme is emerging, so there is benefit to my lack of focus. Here are some of the things I’ve been dabbling in:

  • The Moses Myth, or the book Did Moses Exist?, by Dorothy M. Murdock. Why even ask the question? Of course he did not exist. But it is by asking the right questions that we stumble on to other knowledge.
  • Barry Soetero: I don’t know who Obama is and I don’t care. The idea that Ronald Reagan, an actor, and George W. Bush, a shallow frat boy (not to mention George H.W. Bush, an uncommon criminal) can hold the office of president only means that the office of president itself is a fraud. That the current occupant is a fraud as well … duh.
  • Benghazi: Something happened there. As with Barry Soetero, there are some very strident voices in the background intent on getting our attention. Again, I don’t care. It is obviously a covert op of some kind and timed to affect the election outcome, and it did not work.
  • Laurel Canyon: Musicians are no more or less likely to die premature deaths than any of us, but Dave McGowan’s wanderings in the canyon (Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon) point at something sinister. I have long known that John Lennon was murdered by our lurking dark forces, but add to that list Cass Elliot, Dennis Wilson, Gram Parsons, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Gary Hinman, Duane Allman, Janis Joplin and on and on … these are not accidental deaths. McGowan has stumbled into something freakishly big.

What is the common thread in all of this? Public mythology.
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Yet another bubble …

imageOne of my links on the right is called “Steve Keen’s Debt Watch.” Keen, an Aussie, is one of the few economists that I listen to. He’s watching the pea, and not the shells.

His May 12th article talks about how the overall effect of Quantitative Easement has been to inflate share prices. Wall Street is doing so much better than the rest of the economy because we are in yet another bubble. The last one used the housing market, and hammered a whole generation of folks whose savings were in their homes. This one is in share prices. We can avoid this one by avoiding the market.
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Proper word use

The Anderson militants in their compound
The Anderson militants in their compound
I suffer from many illusions. I think of the dark waxy substance that coats those little donuts that the they sell in little packs of six at gas stations as “chocolate frosting.” I imagine that when I cross a political boundary, say from Colorado into Utah, that the atmosphere has changed and that I am in a different place. When a carton of eggs says “cage free” I imagine chickens in a meadow rather than a heavily crowded building. When I see “organic” I think “better for you” rather than “more expensive.”

Some illusions do not affect me. I never imagine that when I am buying groceries that I have “saved” money, since I am spending money. When I see Starbucks coffee in a 12 oz bag for $11.99, I know that means $16 per pound. I know that a $15 pair of sneakers is priced at $119.99 because of advertising-created illusions of glamor and athletic prowess. When I pay for two items, I know that one of them was not “free.” I know that a “D” or “R” next to a politician’s name is also an advertising-created illusion of difference.

But I ran across one this morning that shocked me. This one has affected me my whole life. I grew up staying each night in a small building with other family members, eating and reading, watching TV and sleeping. Later, like most baby boomers, I got married and had children and we all stayed in a bigger building with more than one bathroom and color TV’s instead of black and white. Now that the kids are grown and gone I am staying in building with more rooms and bathrooms and TV’s than I need.

I always thought of these buildings as my “homes.” As it turns out, I simply don’t know the language we use. CIA uses a different word for these buildings when they attack them with drones.They are not family homes. They are “compounds”.

More importantly, the victims are not brothers and sisters, moms and dads. They are “militants.” And even though my country is attacking their country, my country is “defending” itself. That’s why we have a Department of “Defense” and not departments of “War” and “Aggression.”

It’s just language. Proper use of words makes all the difference.

Hypnotic states

Im a macI bought an iMac a couple of years back. I bought into the Apple aura, that the products were superior and so worth extra money. They are not. My iMac performed just like a PC. It required some different muscle memories to control it. These differences were not improvements.

Apple is the product of a fabulous advertising campaign that reaches us on a deep psychological level. All of the supposed advantages of Apple products over PC’s are merely the result of psychological suggestion. We pay hundreds more for a Mac that performs exactly as a PC. Then we convince themselves that it was worth it because none of us is susceptible to advertising. Right?

I did everything but that last part. I am back on a PC now, and happy to be there.
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It is just gas pains

What it all boils down to is this: Some large energy concerns, Chevron among them, want to develop the natural gas of Ukraine, and so had to dispose of the old government, which was too close to Russia.

Everything else is cover. No one ever cared about democracy, of course. That’s a given. But the other concerns – Russia’s need for a buffer against repeated western invasions, Russia’s need for a warm weather port, the fascist and neo-Nazi elements that now occupy the Vichy government in Kiev … real enough, I suppose.

But not the driver.

Is Neil Young talented?

Young and Jack White prior to Young's historic performance
Young and Jack White prior to Young’s historic performance

Jimmy Fallon had Neil Young on his show a couple of nights ago, and they did something historic: Young recorded Willie Nelson’s song Crazy directly to a Voice-O-Graph vinyl recording booth.

Music is subjective, so I suppose people will disagree, but I thought after Young was done, even knowing he was going for minimalist, that the result was a badly sung song accompanied by a weak guitar with poor sound quality. Young has never appealed to me – I have never picked up on the vibe that made him famous.

He’s done a whole album of similarly recorded songs. Kitschy.

How much of our taste in music is suggested to us? The clothes we wear are entirely the result of suggestion. Ties are getting narrow again, as Fallon and others are wearing them that way. Is music the same – do we learn to like various acts due to subliminal suggestion? Or is it like the fashion business – follow the leader? I cannot imagine why else such mediocre talents as Lady Gaga and Britney Spears achieved stardom. And I imagine that if Neil Young walked into a recording studio today, unknown, that he would be ushered out as quickly.

Fallon’s in-house band, The Roots, by the way – if we can objectively agree on what is musical talent, that would be it. That is one energetic, gifted group of players.

Life in these United States

Former Secretary of State Madelyn Albright has been selected to head a team that will observe the coming elections in Ukraine on May 25th.

Yeah, that makes sense.

In other news, officials in Boston announced that they had exhumed the body of serial killer Ted Bundy to sit and act as an impartial observer in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Since airlines refused to fly a rotting corpse across the country, the judge ordered that the body be transported by rail.

Oh yeah, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. With that in mind, anything is possible.