5 to 1

Although Americans are docile and tamed, we'd do well to remember that some humans don't take being buggered kindly. These two pictures were taken this last week. The first was in Chile, the second in Korea. I like it when people go out into the streets and tangle with armored authority, reminds me that unlike Americans, large swaths of humanity have yet to be domesticated by the system; maybe they never will be. Now the fact that we are on the winning side of a pretty darn gruesome and protracted war for economic dominance makes it easy, convenient and even logical not to complain in any effective or dangerous way; this I understand. National, racial and class boundaries help the fortunate not feel guilty, but it doesn't change the nature of what is going on globally and that lots of people aren't down with the program.
"Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act."
-The Talmud

Music

"Music is Magic. Magic is Life"- Jimi Hendrix's last lyrics
Our world has become a full blown battlefield for the fate of the human race. Ti's a vicious and complex conflict that is what we live, whether we embrace or hide from it. Thus is it that in said conflict their are many weapons and fronts where the struggle rages. Being but singular vulnerable hominids, this is naturally a very terrifying state of affairs, such is our reality in this unprecedented year of 2008 Anno Domini. As the shots are fired all around us in a dizzying display of passion and power there is one dimension to this conflict in which we can take triumphant refuge and its presence is the inspiration of mankind; it's called music. I would have never made it to this moment to write these words without its transcendent glory to save me from myself. It is the soundtrack that records the tribulations of the human soul as it traverses the sordid madness of history. It allows us to dance in an age of despair, death and desire. It turns words from just commonplace necessities into mind blowing beatitudes that guide us on our different and identical journeys upon Earth. It is the most subversive force in an age of unbridled tyranny and control; constantly reminding us of a deeper vein in the human experience. In this era when they try to tell us how orderly and controlled the world should be, we must forever remember the wild thing that is MUSIC- and the indestructible and inexplicable beauty it incarnates.
"Open are the doors to the Deathless
to those with ears.
Let them show their conviction " -Lord Buddha

The 4th

"America is a mistake, a giant mistake." -Sigmund Freud

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between" -Oscar Wilde

Not having an intellect to match those two geniuses above I can't make such a succinct and emphatic statement about my country, the United State of America, so I'll just do what I do know- writing a rambling rant. One thing is for sure though about Americans, we are a wild and emmotional bunch that really doesn't give a flying fuck what the rest of the world thinks about us or our behavior. We are also unintentionally honest- like the fact that the only logical way for us to celebrate our Country is eating bad food and blowing shit up. If it feels good and doesn't require too much effort do it, pretty much our modus operandi. It looks like hard times ahead for this nation of aggressive adventurers, but such in the forge from which all greatness has always emerged. I personally blame the baby boomers and their incomprehensibly stupid behavior in virtually every single aspect of national affairs. They amazingly managed to mismanage the most unprecedented advantage that any people has ever had, and so successfully soil the American ideal that it is now nothing but an incarnation of hypocrisy. Really reminds me of the last generation of Romans before Alaric sacked Rome and proved just how pathetically far they had fallen. Oh well, Sic transit gloria mundi. Now I'm no nationalist, but damn did we have it all set up so perfectly! We could have done just about anything we wanted with the world from helping and uniting humanity to completely annihilating it- and this lame ass shitstorm of opportunistic greed is all we did. God damn what a bummer! Aside from baby boomers I also blame excessive public education for taking what was once a nation of rabid individualists and turning them into the most self serving servile chauvinistic ignorant mob of maniacs the world has seen; or at least that I can think of right now. Having said all that negative shit, there are still some reasons to not count us out: 1) We have a lot of minorities in this country that seem to be a lot more capable and willing to do something with their lives other than get progressively fatter and stupider (roughly 100 million out of 300 million). 2) Just cause one Generation was a bunch of fuck ups doesn't necessarily mean all subsequent ones are going to be the same way (although that is sort of how it generally works). 3) People are voting less and less which proves that on some level we aren't completely unaware of what's going on. 4) With energy shortages looming ominously on the horizon effective entertainment might become unaffordable and consequently make Americans start using their brains again, if indeed any grey matter worth utilizing remains. 5) The rich might have gone too far this time in their abuse of the American worker, who just might retaliate with a ferocity that no one ever expected as things get progressively worse economically.
Sorry, that's the only positive points I can think of so here's another quote-

"Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea."

A lesson from History

"There is simply no room left for 'freedom from the tyranny of government' since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing, under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it." -William S. Burroughs
That incandescent quote cuts right to core of the modern quest for freedom. If the international market economy, which is undeniably the only real ruler for all of earths people, has made it impossible to be free, then why do we still insist on thinking it so important? Americans have always loved pretty words, actually living in accordance with the principles they represent- not so much. Hypocrisy took hold in this country to such an extent that we don't know what that word means either; its simply too much of our national character for most Americans to even identify. I find this particularly interesting from a historical perspective because every other successful Empire I can think of embraced the reality of their culture with unabashed pride and enthusiasm. The Mongols and Romans made no secret of their ambition to kick the shit out of anyone who stood in their way; so what's our deal? I think the answer lay buried a few thousand years back in an often discussed but rarely understood place and time- 5th Century Athens. Essentially the Greeks had fought off the massive Persian Army after being almost completely conquered in one of the most epically awesome conflicts in History. At this juncture the Athenians kept pursuing the war to reclaim all Hellenic territories that had been conquered. All the Greek city-states of the Aegean formed the Delian league, under Athenian leadership, to liberate their fellow Greeks. Now, most of the small members couldn't afford to field ships of their own and were often incapable of contributing any significant numbers of troops. So what they ended up doing was just paying Athens to do both, which it happily did because Athens was a hardcore militaristic Democracy with the largest navy and plenty of people to send off to war. Well, eventually the Persian threat was pretty much over and people sort of began to wonder why Athens still insisted on exacted tribute from all the Delian League members, and so some decided to stop paying. Well, the Boule(βουλή)decided that they didn't want to give up their dominate position and thus voted to punish those that tried to secede. Now the Boule was a lot like the House of Representatives, except that the members were randomly selected from the 10 different tribes of Athens. They didn't necessarily think of themselves as Imperialists, but that didn't mean that in essence that wasn't exactly what they were doing. They thought that their democratic ideals and visibly superior culture meant that it was somehow different when they did essentially the same things that they had denounced the Persians for only a short time before. Long story short the Spartans called shenanigans and after a protracted war put them in their place. If you can't see the parallels between this first recorded experiment with democracy and our own circumstance then I'm truly amazed you can bear the smell, because you must have your head firmly and deeply located up your own ass.

Ron Paul: Who Owns You (Narrated By George Carlin)

George Carlin was one of the good ones, one of the last of an almost extinct breed.

Sonnet for the Situation

So much hope and pain these days
billions of humans struggling with it all
in billions of different and identical ways
desperately hoping that we won't see the fall

the descent from decadence to complete desolation
seems to me that we wont have long to wait
untill this warrior nation is forced into contemplation
how did we become such a twisted sad state

We who once reached for the stars
are now demented killers and conquerers
our pathetic youth, materialists filling bars
still something in our sad souls still stirs

Idealism runs stong in our veins
even if it's left our conscious brains

the leaders lead, the fools follow, the thinkers recoil in horror
worry not about the future, because their can always be more
after all this age is strange, but the only constant is change

Petrol Prices

"Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so."

My goodness how people love to bitch about changes in the Market. I suppose if you were fundamentally ignorant of almost every single aspect of the economic activity of the world complaining is a lot easier than becoming informed. Being the helpful current affairs junky that I am, I have decided to break it down nice and simple like for you all. So there are these companies that retrieve, distribute and sell petroleum right? And they do this for profit. The largest companies are state-owned operations like Saudi Aramco and Petrobras, but the ones we Americans deal with the most are multinational companies. You see if state run companies ever tried the shady shit that the multinationals did it would be very obvious who could hold accountable. So what we see in the unprecedented rise in the per-barrel price of oil is almost entirely the work of the big five- Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron Texaco and Conoco Phillips. Now these corporations would also be able to be held accountable if they did anything too blatant to raise prices, but they are hardcore capitalists, and thus very wily. They know for a fact that the end of easily available oil is going to, in time, completely eliminate the market for their good and service. Consequently they are seeing that they get top dollar while the demand lasts. The occupation of Iraq, the political tensions with Iran and Venezuela, and MEND's continued actions in the Niger Delta have all played completely into their desire to get higher profits than any corporations in the history of Capitalism. So it really isn't that complicated, and as a result could be fixed relatively easily if the American consumer was keener on flexing its economic muscle than the traditional brainless bitching. As much as they destory the world and harm its inhabitants, I can't even really blame the oil companies for doing what corporations are designed to do- make money. Is it their fault that poor countries governments don't stop them and Western consumers are subserviant idiots being led by corrupt opportunistic leaders? I personally would argue that as much as they profit from these situations, it wasn't they that created them (although they played a large part).

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." -Marcus Aurelius

The Mighty Market

"When a man moves away from nature his heart becomes hard."

Allow me to say, in the parlance of our times, that shit is getting wild and looks to be getting even more so in the very near future. The thing we got going here called civilization looks as though it will collapse under its own weight and crush us all. This is largely the result of unbridled use of resources over the past 200 years. In that time the worlds population has more than tripled and our race has become integrated into one mammoth entity commonly called the Market. People and products flow all over the place in a network so complex and fluid that no one really knows how it all works. It has in a few generations fundamentally altered just about every single facet of our existence. In many ways it has helped us all learn more about the different cultures and even done a great deal to increase our knowledge of everything from Astrophysics to Zoology. There is one minor problem to all this however, and that is that we only have one planet to populate, and that being done, we seem incapable of stopping, even when it becomes glaringly obvious that we don't have enough to go around anymore. Our traditional checks of war, famine and plague have all been somewhat neutralized by America's complete military dominance, improved agricultural technology and amazing medicines. We love to exhibit these advances as proof of our spectacular progress. Unfortunately the operating of this Market is based almost entirely upon the affordable availability of one resource- petroleum. This fueled the madness that was the 20th Century and is responsible for the world in which we live. It is an undeniable fact that almost all the easy oil has been gotten, and that the costs associated with extracting what is left will be a huge economic burden. Now oil prices don't only affect transportation, but also food production which is largely dependent upon petroleum based fertilizers. Long story short, the 60 years of economic growth and relative peace since WWII is going to come to an abrupt end. Starvation will rip through the third world like a hurricane and will sweep away whatever semblance of authority there was. The wealthy nations of the world will find that all their capital doesn't amount to anything when their is no fuel to propel their economies. The standard of living will plumet and social unrest will be bound to follow. In such an environment it isn't hard to believe that warfare will return with a vengence as the 6.5 billion people on earth fight tooth and nail. This time not for religion, race or state, but purely for survival. Morality has always been the providence of peace, and naturally leaves the stage as soon as Aries arrives. So here we will be with all these weapons and not enough stuff for everyone... The gears of history have always been lubricated by blood, and I fear that the Market may very well soon require unprecedented amounts to keep functioning. I guess it just wasn't in the cards for us to be able to cooperate enough to make this whole society thing work in the long run; what a bummer for us. The leaders of the G8 recently convened to work towards lowering the price of oil to ensure their economic viability- what a bunch of myopic demented dipshitsOf course nobody wants to be the person to say that the party has to stop, especially when nobody knows how to stop. The G8 is really just a gang of heartless addicts that are so profoundly materialistic that they care about nothing except their GDP. It is going to be one hell of a show, of that much at least we can be certain. All the tamed and trained people in wealthy countries are going to find going cold turkey rough going. At the very most we have a decade or two before all this goes down. So my advice is to get used to living off what your local area can produce, get used to no electricity, and certainly don't have any children.