NO CHRISTMAS UPDATE THIS YEAR

Christmas on a Tuesday.
Humbug.
Also the enlightened local government decided to resume school on a Thursday this year.
So you know. You get to start a new semester on a Thursday, then go Friday then another weekend.
I'm thinking of just putting those two days in as "work free" (AKA days off) days and hoping no one calls those two days because what the flippin' heck am I going to do those two days?
My break was supposed to start Wednesday but someone needed my assistance Friday so that's how it goes.
I'm too popular for my own good.
Anyway, enough talking about my boring real life. I'm starting to sound like one of those bloggers what like I review--
can't have that.

As a child growing up in LA, I knew that different neighborhoods had different houses. My grandmother lived in a small wooden house in downtown LA, and I lived in a small stucco house in the suburbs.

... Well I grew up in MD and was under the delusion that different neighborhoods had the same houses.
I just assumed every neighborhood was its own parallel tangent universe.

ther neighborhoods had different houses. At the time, I thought that it was geography that dictated the difference, but as I traveled more, I realized that it was time. There were small wooden houses in nearly every city, as well as stucco houses, and old Victorian houses. It depended on when they were built, not where.

It also depends on where you live.
That's why Japanese houses look Japanese--
and houses near the beach are kind of dull colors because the salt water eats bright color paint--
Also if the phrase "old Victorian house" didn't tip you off to perhaps when it was built (the Victorian era) then you might be a little bit stupid.
THAT SOUTHERN GOTHIC LIBRARY NEAR WHERE I LIVE--
WONDER WHEN AND WHERE IT WAS BUILT?

Today we are seeing an uprising of Americans concerned about the loss of their standard of living. The politicians and many people refer to it as the loss of the "middle class".

What was the middle class?

Yes, what is the middle class?
We've been waiting so long for you to explain the concept to us. No wonder the economy sucks.

It was workers who were paid well enough to be able to buy a house and a car, have plenty to eat, take vacations and buy their kids toys and then send them to college.

The pretense now is that the middle class are a special breed of people, hard-working and college educated, honest and thrifty. But that's not at all true. 

Would you believe the term isn't easily defined?

 It was a time, not a people. A time when organized workers got good wages and benefits, and the ruling class was willing to share more of the proceeds of the labor that they got from the workers. People today work just as hard, usually for longer hours, and many college educated people make low wages. The people haven't changed, the times have.

And yet the term dates to the 18th century.
I imagine times have changed more between the 18th century and the 1950s than the 1950s to now.
I don't think things are that different, honestly.
God this entry sucks.
Just typical whinging about how our American democracy is collapsing all around us and who gives a shit, honestly?
I just wish the fucking thing would collapse already so I can tell you people you were as dumb as I said all along.

I may have blogged about one of my co-workers a few years ago, when he bragged about how much he loved going down to Texas, as part of his military police duties, and performing "cell extractions" for practice, because the Texas authorities didn't care how brutal they were. 

Of course Texas.

Last week, he came to work and explained that when he woke up that morning, he had 5 phone messages from the military, telling him that he was honorably discharged, with full benefits, unless he got his Congressman to intervene in 24 hours. WTF? He was dumfounded. And so am I. He said that in no way would he quit the military now, not when he'd worked so hard to get where he is, and not when he had a sweet deployment coming up in October.

OF COURSE
TEXAS.

 Why indeed? And why was someone who has been in the military for years sent to boot camp? And how did someone in the Military Police end up in the Special Forces? I didn't ask him any of that. 

How does an MP end up in the special forces?
Because the special forces recruit from any other job?
You have to understand special forces are basically hired goons that you can just unleash on an unsuspecting populace.

But I do know that the military picks the most brutal of their members to be in the most repressive of their units. So, I'm guessing that that is how he ended up in Special Forces. But why the sudden drumming out? Is it possible that the US is really taking the protests of the Afghan government seriously?

No?
Look, the military is run like a business in the US.
An extremely inefficient business that would go bankrupt without the government propping it up but still it's total decisions by committee 24/7.

And are they weeding out those that they know will live out their brutal fantasies of wielding power and dealing out fear, torture and death to those unable to fight back? Are they actually trying to stop US soldiers from raping, murdering and urinating on Afghan civilians? When I told this story to friends on Saturday, one of them said that the same thing happened to a friend of her children. Although he was diagnosed with PTSD, he was to be re-deployed to Afghanistan, until they suddenly informed him of his immediate honorable discharge from the military. Interesting. 

IT'S LIKE THEY'RE DOWNSIZING OR SOMETHING HURR DERP!

No American Empire

All empires fall, usually from overextension. The U.S. has over 700 military bases around the world, and the stated
goal of the U.S. military is “full spectrum dominance” of the globe. Not only is this impossible, it's illegal and immoral.

>illegal
>immoral
>world politics
No such thing.

All life on Earth depends on the ecosystem in which we evolved. What we call the "economy" is what humans have created to provide for our needs. What we call the "financial system" is the way in which we trade goods and services between ourselves and others on this planet.

Is the system working? I don't think that any rational person would conclude that it is. 

Well I'm not a hunter gatherer and none of my friends are hunter gatherers so I think it's working in at least some capacity--
In fact: never hunted or gathered once in my life.
Still here.

Many people in the United States, including all the corporate candidates and some in the Occupy movement, demand a return of the so-called "middle class".

What was the "middle class"?

After WW2, when the rest of the industrialized world had been bombed into rubble, the US rode high. After decades of agitation, the ruling class gave some ground to the working class, and vast sections of the working class were paid very well, especially the unionized members. Although the widespread purges of the 50s decimated leftists, especially in the government,unions, education and the media, the idea that workers deserved to be paid a living wage, that the elderly deserved a pension, that the unemployed deserved a pittance, continued to form the basis of our society.

Idiot: the middle class was not an invention of the 1950s.
It was an invention of the renaissance. 
It is so embarrassing to read Americans blogging about politics because most Americans really seem to be under the delusion that 90% of the shit that they consider American was an invention of a time well before America was a country.
America invented freedom and the middle class.
Brilliant.

We are told that mammals evolved during the dinosaur era, but were small and few. When the meteor took out the dinosaurs, the mammals flourished.

Faced with the overwhelming control of our country and others by the giant multi-national corporations, many people are responding by forming small cooperative ventures in the belly of the beast.

...
Speaking of something unrelated, what's up with cooperative ventures?
Seriously, what the fuck was that?
What does that have to do with any of that have to do with dinosaurs?

Organic farmers, food co-ops, small manufacturing concerns - all are very good things.

We must switch to locally produced energy, food, goods and services, with trade on a smaller scale than the giant supply lines that the multi-nationals use.

Yes, we need to switch to trade on a smaller scale.
Let me just go to my local cellphone producer--
hey wait a minute.

But it's not enough to gather together and create people-sized organisms, as long as the multi-national dinosaurs continue to trample the lands, people, animals, fish, air and water of the planet.

Yes, let's dismantle all of that shit.
Have fun with no internet, phone system, education system or highway system.
You'd be dead in a month.

Beauty pagaent contestants frequently respond, when asked what they dream of, "I want to feed all the little children of the world." More likely, they dream of a modeling contract, followed by a movie career.

If someone asked me what I dream of I'd just recite that speech Mankar Camoran gives at the end of Oblivion because it sounds like the most insane rambling you've ever heard in your entire life.
And it's all read by Terence Stamp.

What does overproduction of food mean? What effects does it have upon America and the world when 6,000 daily calories of corn for every American is produced?

I know what it means in EVE Online: artificial shortages.

so that a people who used to think chicken every Sunday was high living now eat dead animals for every meal, usually deep fried in corn oil. 

... As opposed to all of us eating living animals, what?

The result? Obesity rates in the US have skyrocketed, along with the rate of diabetes. 75% of Americans are now considered either overweight or obese. It is interesting to see that farm subsidies are never mentioned as the source of the 500% increase in obesity since 1975. As with the skyrocketing unemployment rates, individual Americans are blamed. 

All because America grows a ton of corn?
I'm going to need some citation on this.
Or shit, let's keep it simple: I'm going to need these unrelated things to form a coherent idea first.
I'm willing to buy that because of corn Americans are fat but what the fuck does that have to do with unemployment?

Just as no one ever asks why 20 million unemployed Americans became "lazy" in the last 10 years, when globalization increased the numbers of factories moved out of the country, no one ever asks why so many Americans lost their willpower when the farm subsidies started. Instead, they are sternly lectured on healthy food choices.

Americans don't eat all of the surplus, of course. The rest of the overproduction is burned in cars or shipped overseas. 

Holy shit, international trade?
Fucking
facist
scum.

When the US invaded Iraq, the cradle of civilization, the birthplace of agriculture, one of the edicts forced upon that country was that Monsanto was turned loose to sell seed yearly to the farmers.

Birthplace of agriculture and yet it still looks like the surface of the fucking moon.
Irrigation people, come on.
Oh yeah. Most of the irrigated places are growing opium.
Convenient detail this cunt forgot to mention--
The primary country this country has with drugs is Mexico and the Arab world.
Just legalize the shit.
No one could compete.
Look what this country did with corn.
Corn, a crop relatively devoid of nutritional value and fairly difficult to grow and we grow enough to feed enough of it to keep even the fattest of Americans satisfied.

The greed of the 1% baffles most people. The 400 richest Americans own more than the bottom 150 million combined, yet most of the bottom 150 million Americans would be happy with economic security. While they may dream of winning the lottery, a good-paying job with a house and a car are all they really aspire to.

 Look. I did this shit all the time in FFXIV.
At some point it just becomes this insane game.
I'd corner the raptor skin market for days at a time just because I could.
Did I know if I'd make money?
I don't even know if I did. Money had ceased to have meaning to me in that game.
Things just cost money to me. The specific amount was so trifling and unimportant I didn't even bother keeping score.

But multiple mansions and cars and private jets and private islands don't seem to be enough for the insatiable rich. What character defect drives them?

I remember buying an expensive set of armor, then giving it away and buying it in a different color just because I didn't like the first set's color.
There were like 4 sets in the entire game at the time.

How can they justify taking from people who have almost nothing, in order to add to their inventory of expensive belongings?

Because you have the misfortune of starting a few minutes after I started playing or you weren't as clever at leveling as I was.
Most of my money was had when I was one of about 15 level 40+ leatherworkers.
Leatherworking was probably the second hardest craft to level (the hardest, culinarian, also had no use) and everyone needed some leather product or other.
This also gave me insight into a market most people didn't know existed and yep.
There we go.
My goal now is EVE Online because the market in that game is infinitely more complex and interesting.

Let's get this straight. Wall Street speculators gambled with home mortgages, running up trillions of dollars of collateralized debt obligations. Millions of people lost their houses.

Americans were unmoved. They shouldn't have bought houses that they couldn't afford when the mortgages went up.

Well, you know--

rule 1 of EVE Online: don't fly what you can't afford to lose. 

Never mind global warming. Never mind peak oil. Never mind the 50,000+ dead in car crashes a year, the dead bodies along all our roads, the air pollution, the urban sprawl.

So what?
No more cars?
Lady if this country did even a quarter of the shit you propose you'd be dead.

I can't imagine you growing your own crops.

And I don't mean just for eating.

Who makes your clothes?
Your medicine?
The timber for your house?
The glass for your windows?
Who mines the gold that's in your electronics?
Who synthesizes the polymers for your plastics?
Are you seriously prepared to lose all that shit without a ready replacement?
Where are you going to get water?

Assuming you are enough of a survivalist to grow your own food and hunt for food and leather to make clothes--

where are you hunting?

Where are you growing all your food?

50,000 dead each year from car crashes would pale into insignificance compared to the millions upon millions that would be dead when you rolled the calendar back to the stone age.

Look what happened to Cambodia. 

I wonder if there were cavemen decrying the invention of the wheel as the end of civilization.

Fuck everything.