Moral question of our time

 A moral question of our time.

Here we are. In the middle of the moral question of our time. The israel question and the answers weve been given provide the thoughtful fodder of every question about power and how it is used throughout the world.

Any historian can apply how israel was created, maintained, supported, even in the face of in-your-face generational conflict, freedom fights, reaction.

Anti-semitism has been around for a long time.

First of all, there is an impression that there is peace and these wars, conflicts, are anomalies. There is not Peace, then no peace. If war is defined as not only the military conflict that takes place on battlefields everywhere, but we have to add to that definition the preparation for war is certainly an element in making war. When war is, looked at in its fullest historical sense, there is a moment when war always reflects the economies, culture, and most certainly, the politics of any nation.

Peace is called when there seems to be a lull in making war but those lulls are still fully engaged historical moments when weapons transfers, productions, and distributions continue to take place behind the white noise of "normalcy". Not to mention that economies continue to run on those investments, collaborations, and productions of the entire war machinery.

Peace in the historical history of war has merely held a position of historical moment when treaties, agreements, between warring parties have been established but not adhered to.

Rebellion is not a war crime.

Was the little big horn a war crime?

Is settler resistance a war crime?

Is any resistance to apartheid, slavery, nation state sponsored atrocity, war crimes?

Was hiroshima, wounded knee, shermans march to the sea, the murder of black panthers, murder of george floyd, are they war crimes?

Is the acknowledged apartheid and denial of palestinian rights in Israel ever since its inception a war crime?

Or is war always defined by the most powerful or is genocide in the eye of the beholder?

If seventy years ago the western nations gave israel a homeland despite the zionist revolution of displacing indigenous non - jewish population and the future of this is whats happening today, what more evidence do we need to not trust what they'll do today to be resolved even seventy years from now. 

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All the ghosts to come

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 All the ghosts yet to come to haunt us.

Religions should lead the charge for hope but when it comes to revolution and politics, only pressure counts

Is it genocide, is it apartheid, is it racist, is it fascist? The questions of our time, this time. We are certainly getting the fine points of each of these questions which have more to do with morality than anything else. Morality used to be the god prerogative but since we no longer are the benefactor of a just nor rational god because it's been put in the hands of men. So, the questions remain for the new man, Artificial Intelligence. If we believe that AI will be any different than the men who create it, we remove ourselves one step more from reality. All i can say is, "we have a right to defeat ourselves."

Is homogeneity the same as conformity the same as way way too much lack of diversity?

Or Is diversity really always good or just the new homogeneity?

Another question, i wonder if the "discovery" of all the gazans under the rubble will swing from the rope we always try to hang our hopes upon.

When people went to charles bukowskis door, they could hear a big fuck you, go away.

Deportation is just another form of detention and incarceration, proxy style, where the immigrants escape from their own oppressive environment, are returned, like escaped prisoners here.

There is a certain inevitability to climate change as well as certain effects, such as flooding, droughts, storms, all of which effect agriculture, seasonal changes, infrastructure, resource depletion, water shortages.

Well, the same goes for the absence of truthtelling. When there is a social, political system based on lies, denials, and misinformation, there are certain guaranteed results among populations, such as social chaos, divisions among classes, crime, less efficiency, anti-democratic, breakdown of institutions and traditions (which can be a good and bad thing, Eh?), rise of fascism. And like climate change, the decline of these social, cultural and political standards give rise to an ongoing deterioration of social cohesiveness.

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Fisa- Part 2

Fisa and the right to privacy part 2

The abortion issue highlights our (progressives) inability or unwillingness to anticipate how the country is going. Back in the sixties when roe vs wade became the federal law of the land, the right to privacy was reserved for regular people as well as political elites, celebrities etc. the main exception to the right to privacy were those who JEdgarHoover decided didn't have any rights, such as communists, black panthers, civil rights leaders, movement leaders, and a whole plethora of renegade and outlaw groups. 

After roe vs wade, various states began to bombard the courts with what they believed to be exceptions to the rule and that was what no one expected to be the new anti-abortion front. In addition, 9/11 happened, though we still do not know how, but privacy for more groups and their american collaborators went out the window. So, with all that, by the early 2000's when guantanamo, torture, proxy wars based on lies or fear became the american political pastime, we progressives, continued to be so embattled over principles, fear, nationalistic jingoism, Patriot Act acceptance, it's hard to believe, but we still didnt believe federal law could be inviolate.

 

Right up to the election of Trump but even before that, the appointment of judges, the growth of the tea party movement, congressional stalemates should have given us the incentive to stop relying on Hope as our sole political power and get our asses moving.

And does it need to be said that during all these decades, the current relationship between palestinians and their israeli overseers was ineveitably going to bring us to what we have today. It shouldn't have taken an apocalyptic prognosticator to see that one coming.

Do we not see the relationship between oppression and the eventual uprising that always comes behind it, just because it's not happening in our nation, but our nation has a lot to do with it.

In fact, there's very little said about it, but 9/11 itself didn't happen in a vacuum, and part of the reasons why it happened was Americas involvement with israel, the arab states, and all the regional conflicts that preceded it, lebanon, saudi gas, beirut, afghanistan, iran, the cold war. 

American politicians want us to believe that america wants peace but it is forced into war, so then we prepare for war and never look at peace as more than temporary capitulation on our adversary's part.

Why do we expect things to change? Will they change even today as colleges and universities are in turmoil? Certainly not guaranteed.

I understand Brown U made a deal with its protesters to have a referendum over divestiture but does everyone know that there is a federal law that does not allow divestiture with Israel and what about americas sanction policy against countries such as Cuba, Venezuela? Aren't sanctions similar to divestiture or even similar to blockades (except as seen through the eyes of the banking system) rather than ships or tanks? Aren't blockades a tactic in warfare? Why are we always using warfare strategy in our so called "status of defender of worldwide democracy and freedom"?

 

We really can care less about any of that, if you turn around and look at all those sucker nations tagging along behind the shark, waiting for scraps.

Its complex but we cannot afford to be for one thing because it affects our conscience and against one thing because our nation says it must be done.

Question everything and stop being divided.

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Land of the Three

 

Land of the Three

It appears the universities are taking a page out of the new playbook that says, forget free speech, forget divestiture, we are the bastions against thought, one of the bastions that's been bought.
Here's what is going to happen now.
The coin has been tossed. Heads you lose, tails you lose.
Students arrested or suspended from their schools will pay a price for their dissent here in the " occupied" land of the three i.e.-president, congress, and corporate greed.
War thinkers, warmakers, warmongers, political sycophants. Toads
Nevertheless, despite the necessity of people challenging the national hubris/supremacy and its corporate interests at all costs, it may too late to just protest. It's been true in the past and is still true, protest, no matter how righteous the cause, is not enough. It was barely enough when MLK led the march for the people of america. Yes, vietnam was about the vietnamese fight for freedom from colonial domination but here in america, it was more about american kids being sacrificed for who knows what, america's war for the liberation of free capital adventurism. I am happy to say that for those who have forgotten, vietnam actually seems to be a relatively successful anti-american success story. They did it with patience and endurance though having to take the usual american atrocities, assassinations, bombing campaigns.
Now, protesting Israel and the destruction of all palestinian institutions and infrastructure, has meaning more as empathy rather than something involving most americans. There will be another muslim purge here, mostly arab and ethnic cleansing which if it weren't so sad, might be beneficial to palestinians and arabs in general. All that talent, medical, engineers, technological expertise with a touch of hate.
We'll spend a generation more, at least haggling the righteousness of the most powerful nation on earth, turning one of its pet projects on one of the truly captive populations in the world. It's the world of politics and like phil ochs said, "You are living in the free world, and in the free world you must stay."
Fortunately for america's indigenous people, the firepower hadn't been developed yet to rid "our purple mountains majesty" of its original people completely.
WE, all those sympathetic and supportive, must carry it forward together in building another social order. I've been focused lately on our need for social, not individualistic, collaborative efforts. Developing connections, real connections, with the thousands of vital friendly ngos, food production, transportation, communal, cooperative, workers associations.

If all that empathetic and intellectual talent being abused and used at the university level put themselves in committing to building a new and truly universal society along with the working class, we'd be on the way to what needs to be done.
We will not win if we dont. In fact, we may not win if we do. Nothing is guaranteed in life nor revolution. They've spent generations perfecting the art of oppression, war, stifling the emergence of new ideas and thwarting attempts to move forward. Feminists after the trump election, black lives matter after george floyd murder, world trade organization protests, arab spring, days of rage, strikes, fights. All, despite their righteous causes failed to make a permanent difference. It's always incremental change, if you want to say "change" at all.
Since everything these days is about gambling, i.e. Sports, elections, israel-genocide war (you know, the bet where israel's conscience conflicts with itself over to actually reflect Judaism or zionism), and will trump go to jail or the white house? Those heady issues plus more coming down the road all the time, we don't know about yet, unless we're practicing necromancy and fortune telling.
I'm going to take a stab on it. 

This year, and maybe next year, will be big years in determining how far to the right the us will go.
It will only go to the right, kind of like a sickly whale, ready to expire. Of course, it (america) won't just end up on a barren beach somewhere, it will undoubtedly take whatever it can down with it)
Let's just make sure we dont go there with it. 

We have to be ready, be prepared for the long haul. All the brainpower progressives have must be aligned with the muscle of working people who will use their backs, arms, legs, and heads to create a new social order, create the freedom, the sweat of the brow and the smart responsibility for each other to realize the goals of the movement.
In other words, we're never going to do anything constructive, being atomized and divided by each of our own interests, but together, with the power within each of us united for the many.
One for all, all for one.
It's been a long time since i read The Three Musketeers.
Or when the light turns green, you still have to look both ways.


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The Bubble

 The present is a bubble. The past is a wall. The future is as intangible as a dream. Where does that time leave us, like stranded on a desert isle, lone palm tree and all?

All we have are the voices journalism brings to us, they speak loud and clear. I'm starting to believe in karma, but karma like god takes its time, what comes around, goes back around.

The left is always looking for the good inside the bad, like gutting the worm out of the apple to make the apple edible to the modern palate.

The world was the place to live but now the world is merely the place where god set us down while he went somewhere else to play and we have to escape with haste, otherwise either the climate or the politicians, are going to kill us all.

Which would you rather have? Storm or shells, not the ones by the sea. Or

The earth riding universal star streams, like fallen celebrities of stardust fame, tampering with reality tinkering,

Galaxies, wave upon wave,

We cannot find the truths which aligned the stars to our delight,

Nor the moons crusty shell, reflector of our light,

The sirens blare, the sea arises,

Fancy, white crested plumes smash against the cliffsides might.

down by the seashore, we must go,

To the rowboats, to the rowboats we must sail,

we must abandon our mother earth,

Like she is the titanic's maiden voyage.

And the iceberg has prevailed.

If you do not go down to the rowboats,

to the rowboats we must go,

The sea will come for you.

Teeth wide sharp to embrace you.

Like a prayer it asks for nothing

But everything is its way.

we will all become seafarers, noah will be our hero,

Capt Ishmael at your service, mam,

The whale's mouth, welcome to our sepulcher,

The whales back, ropes upon, strapped,

We ride the plunged spear, yet freedom is our prisoner.

Our gods have failed us, our way of life a stalemate.

A meandering path, leading back to the sea,

Crawling with hunger and as patient as a fisher

As it skims across the waves froth.

Charles Bukowski 1

 

Charles Bukowski 1

"All gnarled and bent like the exposed roots of a tree, gone now but forever free." Allred Black

Most of us are a hell of a lot closer to being homeless than being millionaires and millionaires are a dime a dozen these days, so what does that tell you what we’re worth in dollars and sense. I feel like a backyard chicken spending my days pecking at bugs and every now and then pooping out an egg or two for my master, or nation, whatever you want to call it.

I actually remember a conversation with my first real girlfriend and I asked her what she wanted to accomplish in her life and she said she wanted to be a millionaire and I said I wanted to be a doctor. That about sealed the deal on a forever kind of love even though she realized her goal while I floundered in the role of Sancho Panza. None of those windmills had MD on them, doctors don’t grow on trees but disillusioned men and unpretty women fly in the face of somebody else’s plans. All this was during the era when 50,000 mostly OUR men and boys would be bulletized, schrapnelized, mortalized, brought home in body bags, on the verge of nuclear war, and ripe for the hanging trees of our society.

Remember we used to get over 100,000 people in the street and baby, even if it was cold outside, it was so so sweet.

I don’t have any idea what young people today are talkin about and thinking about. Believing You can be a millionaire today is a long- suffering illusion for most, just like it was back in my day, but now it seems better suited as a temporary measure conducive to some sort of addiction, corruption, and denial about the fact we’re about the most domesticated and stupid of animals, having lost our instinct for living free.

Born free.

Commercials keep us heavy in the stupor while delusion keeps us moving about in dreams.

The shift to fascism came like a thief in the night but it was a long time coming, nurtured by powerful men of all persuasions, steeped in the American dream, drowned in the sweet goddamned promise that tomorrow never comes and death is something that happens to everybody else.

 The truth is we lost our love for trying to figure out what buttons we should push to get the pellets, like Pavlov’s dogs. We’re one big science experiment now, with salivating scientists running around with their hand held computers trying to figure if we’re capable of withstanding the irrelevancy of space travel or the homogeneity of medicated soup.

Everyone puts so much shit into their bodies and it’s obvious that the fear engendered by the warnings of doing this does not outweigh the fact we can still live until we’re seventy and say we want to live but not without our addictions.

Buddha certainly saw the undeniable truth the desolation a human being can be and found the state of being, nirvana, selfless, some of us could reach as long as someone brought us water and crumbs to eat.

At least, Jesus never took up the sword in his day and others who followed him, never took up the weapons of their day, but for those who did believe in armies and the mighty night, I think we can discount them as really never being able to offer us anything but strife.

I just watched the supposed last chapter in the Star Wars saga and if we’re just going to tale all our treachery and misconceptions about the universe and turn it into reality, count me out.

If we’re heading to the resurrection of fascism, which was never dead, but certainly has the capability of taking us all into the world of slavery, both mental and physical, and trapping us in cages of desire, painless illusion, then count me out.

It used to be pain told us when something was wrong. A Warning. A time to reflect but we’re all spinning out of control in our fast paced, angry routines that are supposed to keep us healthy, wealthy, and numb to everything outside of our own little cage big enough to drive your car in. It’s a cage without bars but we still want to escape, don’t we?

I could probably sign this off as Bukowski Proud.

Dead Men Tell No Tales

 

You can talk all you want about the glories of war, but you have to go to Washington d.c. and look at the wall and cemeteries to see who died there and the price one has to pay.

It’s true dead men tell no tales we need to keep, for those who sacrifice for the shame of artifice and lie we can only weep.

Their woes are imprisoned in the unbeating hearts of other men who lived on without him, who gild this dirty history, like a secret society, sworn to never reveal what we already know, they glean their riches from young men’s dreams. And young women’s souls.

All he ever wanted was to be a good, hard-working auto mechanic. To live out his simple dreams in the landscape of milk and honey.

He could have done that in any country on earth, yet his call to duty was framed in a false glory of a made-up story, his martyrdom already guaranteed as he lay far away in the mud, in a valley of green, a bloody battlefield in a place he never would have imagined he’d be, had he lived and died in the way he dreamed.

Capitalism part 2

 

Capitalism part 2

Capitalism has an evolution just like the prophet motive. In fact they went, came, and are going hand in hand.

When thomas more wrote utopia, he himself was both a believer in the authority of the church and a idealist supporter of communal prosperity and the working class. Mind you, he was conflicted as all intellectuals, no matter who or what ideal they represent, should be.

Utopia thomas more published in 1516

Utopia coined from greek word meaning "no place". Also puns on greek word-eutopia, a happy or fortunate place.

Utopia and dystopia, contradictory perfections.  Dystopia is a form of perfection whereby people function on a level that repetition and denial of reality seem to overwhelm any possibility of changing to a more efficient or improved social system less akin to a mouse on a wheel.

Utopia on the other hand is an imagined system (since no utopias are currently functioning in this world of disorder and dysfunction) whereby the social system is designed or redesigned in order to be more efficient and less dysfunctional, usually by a consensus, direct representation, direct vote, 

Since dantes inferno and the catholic churchs official invention of heaven, after death, utopias and futuristic dystopia.

If one could write the perfect utopian novel, all characters will look like the perfect subjects of a rigid dictatorship, thus through the universal law of irony, dystopia becomes the novels theme.

Ideas of heaven, perfection of the soul, of god himself, are all tropes for the reasoning that perfection is possibility, constantly tinkering with control to reach an irreversible perfect society, where if argument exists, then its only to reach a consensus.

His perfect society as represented by Raphael, the utopian visiter narrator of the story, contained all of the idealisms-sharing of resources, equality of work between occupations and surprisingly, sexes, freedom of religion with the belief that most people would eventually see the light when it came to the Church, but, maybe most of all, the belief that human beings living in a stable and secure environment are basically good.

But in case utopians ran into less enlightened peoples, the narrator outlined how utopians would conduct their disagreements with other nation states, a sort of opposable thumb rendition to the fist like hard philosophy of machiavelli.

Utopians would avoid confrontation and war almost at all costs, preferring direct and immediate negotiations.

And there is a discussion of capitalism and communism ( remember this is 1520) that could be taken out of the red scare pamplets of early nineteen hundred arguments about the same thing. Will someone who gets the necessities of life, i.e. food, shelter, water, and attention, the same as everyone else through work and communal (read communistic social behavior) have enough incentive to live? Or if the individual has a right to use the work of others for their own profit without a commitment to the general social good, will there be stability, security, and cohesion?

Our history books are filled with inclinations to transpose some sort of communal idealism unto the profit motive, such as a belief that modern society has adopted the supposed good thing about communal life-equality, justice, security, universal commitment to the social order, etc- while demanding compliance to a larger, more unstable aspects of a nation state-war, economic instability  by having a banking industry managed by profit and expedience and indebtedness), inequality within the hierarchy of various social and working classes, just to name a few.

Of course, this managed and controlled social orientation is deceptive since there is very little reason for anyone to believe an alternative can be considered. Most of the modern, powerful nation states have already institutionalized their weaknesses, without admittance there is any weakness, thus assuring their demise, which unfortunately is such a slow process, taking generations, it may always look as if its the beginning of the end until it is the end.

It is very hard for utopians of any sort to be believable these days, for most progressive, intellectual, or political idealists from both the left and right wings can barely see the real light of day. Many believe that universally, everyone can be brought up to the standard of a typical middle-class life by either believing there is enough to go around or there should be enough with proper management of resources. Some believe that humanity is innately inhumane so more authority in the right places is what needs to be done. Some say nuke em, others say de nuke.

How do we manage all these threats and possible alternatives?In todays world, thats part of the problem, too many choices that aren't really choices because we've come to believe everything's possible.

Our decisions arent about living anymore, at least for those who do have a middle class life. Those who dont have a middle class life, dont have so many choices and, to tell the truth, dont really care about those who think working to survive is outdated and let their trusts, 401s, investments, and gambling speak for them on the marketplace of ideas. No matter that nearly everyones pension plans now are so compromised by corporate/capital profits in weapons, defense, intelligence, space, risk taking that it is impossible to extract ones own progressive philosophy from the ulterior motives of making the most money.

And what about money itself? Aside from believing in it as a contrived management of value based exchange, the entire original premise that paper had value behind it in form of gold and silver has become obsolete since gold and silver were confiscated by governmental decree, weve had to accept another degree of separation of value for goods and services.

Another example of unproven concepts borrowed from social communalism is unionism. Partial unionism, as we have it here, is derived from old beliefs in the expertise of trade occupations over general "jack of all trades" type of services.

All working people should be vested in improving their own lives as well as the lives of others. We are all united in that way. Despite the nazi's confiscating the "Work will set you free" communal call and turning it into a holocaust trope, it is work that keeps us together.

Capitalism and Fascism use work as a weapon in order to control the outcomes within the social order. Marx also used work as the basis for revolution of an eventual classless society but the Russian revolution has gone far away from uniting the working class and now, just like the western capitalist nations, has usurped imperial and dynastic conquest as its motivation. We're all left between a rock and a hard place. which could be a good thing if we learn to use a hammer, a sledge hammer, to free ourselves, figuratively speaking, of course.

Beware, Be Wary, Think