A LONG SWIM

 Yer Ol' Perfesser's Uncomfortable Morning Dose of Nasty, Imperial "Real-Politik":

When you're an empire, your warz NEVER end, and you don't WANT them to. They're what keep you strong.

Pax Americana, Pax Romana, Pax Britannica: They don't maintain themselves...It takes the expenditure of blood and treasure.

In fact, they're not even "wars." It's "warfare, the exercise of military instruments, SHORT of marshalling all resources to defeat an opponent. We conduct training exercises with live ammo and dead bad guys: military adventures at the frontiers.

These exercises perform several, vital, imperial functions: 1) they keep the MIC spinning busily along, using up both materiele and troops; 2) they keep our adversaries and our allies edgy and off-balance; 3) they keep the engines of commerce humming, and 4) they preent the "home front" with "heroes.

And THAT means invasions, counter-insurgencies, police actions, interventions, "peace-keepers," 'surges,' aerial sorties, huge flotillas of ships and planes, an all-volunteer army: all KINDS of things to keep an Empire afloat.

And, before you suggest: Let it sink!, consider how far and how long YOU/WE would have to swim to shore...

Bad Parenting

 

Everything we 'know' is mediated: shaped for, encapsulated in and conveyed by advertizing, public relations and behavioral psychology.More and more "primary acculturation" is occurring in "on-line" situations, less and less at home or in school or anywhere else, interpersonally.
Parents put phones in kids' hands long before there is any need to, if they were adequately prepared to be parents.
Which many if not most present-day parents are emphatically NOT. Mothers grocery shopping while gossipping to a pal ignore their kids and send them a clear message.
The entire internet culture is designed to ensnare users in a never-ending whirl of consumption and information and sales and tchotchkes couched in tropes that are the products of more than 100 years of hyper-persuasive, seemingly irefutable, highly sophisticated propagandas, i.e., the advertisingand public relations industry.
The earlier kids are permitted and encouraged to become embroiled in it, the more dependent upon it they will become.
 

Space Travel: Selling Your Planet to The Devil?

For 60+ years, "space flight" has been held out as a carrot to induce more government spending on space flight research. It has employed thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians and bureaucrats at comfortable salaries. But NASA is but a shell of it's former self, and private enterprise has now entered the fray to appropriate and exploit what Government "created."

"Space" flights like Branson's (or Musk's and Bezos' proposed excursions) are vitally important because they preserve the illusion--necessary, as we DESTROY the life-world on the planet--that we can wreck the Earth, but escape our fate and leave our blighted home behind.

Nagahapun; it's propaganda, of course. But people need "hope."Optimism about space flight is international gospel for the very reason that it keeps morale up. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, all the orthodox, public-minded participants in the discourse, including of course the corporate giants which will manufacture the machinery, are eager that humans "aim for the stars."

I am usually informed that I misuse the label, but I call this the precise realization and reification of Fermi's Paradox, from the inside. Enrico Fermi, one of the proto-nuclear-physisists on the Manhatttan project, was puzzled: "Developed" cultures potentially capable of space-faring should be numerous on the billions of life-supporting planets there SHOULD mathematically be in our galaxy. But we've never contacted any. What are the odds?

My premise, what I mean when I use the phrase "Fermi's Paradox," is that the explanation probably resides in what a society or a culture has to "know"--the science--to venture into space and how that "knowledge" must be "acquired" and "learned," and the fact that, in order to learn the knowledge and develop the technologies to support inter-stellar travel or even communication apparently (in our evidence: n=1) requires an "evolutionary" approach to exploitation of necessary resources, such that in acquiring them, the damage to the life-world becomesw irreparable and sooner or later renders moot the effort to escape it, and the star-gazing cultures expire in the process, before they can find or be found.*

Calling Dr. Faustus...Please pick a Red phone...

(* May be the longest sentence you;ll read today.)

• Optimism about space flight is international. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, all the orthodox, public-minded participants in the discourse, including of course the corporate giants which will manufacture the machinery, are eager that humans "aim for the stars."

  I am usually informed that I misuse the label, but I call this the realization of Fermi's Paradox: "Developed" cultures potentially capable of space-faring should be numerous on the billions of life-supporting planets there SHOULD mathematically be in our galaxy. But we've never contacted any. What are the odds?

  My premise, that I attribute to "Fermi's Paradox," is that, in order to learn the knowledge and develop the technologies to support it requires an "evolutionary" approach to exploitation of necessary resources, such that in acquiring them, the damage to the life-world sooner or later renders moot the effort to escape, and they expire in the process, before they can find or be found.

  Calling Dr. Faustus...Please pick a Red phone...

Why "War" Is Obsolete But "Warfare" Isn't

 A Digression:

Bucky Fuller believed war was obsolete.
If by "war" is meant the harnessing, ordering, marshaling, and devoting the preponderant amount of a Nation's resources, treasure and personpower to the accomplish the total defeat of an antagonist and the capture of their lands and property (e.g. Shepherd, 1996)--as it was for about 15,000 years--then Bucky was right. "War" in that way is obsolete.

But the warring impulse hasn't been dimmed, nor has it diminished. "War" has become a wholly filled metaphor if we do not blanch at it being applied to poverty, crime and drugs.

Here, I believe, a new discursive distinction between "war" and "warfare" would be useful, inasmuch as "war" in the traditional sense is pretty much impossible anymore w/out MAD, of one sort or another.

That is, the US doesn't go to "war" anywhere anymore. It arbitrarily conducts Imperial warfare at the fringes of Empire to remind our antagonists that we still can, and our friends that we're still willing, and the uncommitted to step warily.

A Life Without Ambition

 

I didn't have any childhood ambitions. There was nothing I really wanted to be "when I grew up." I just wanted to grow up.

I was a sickly boy, ill for a lot of my pre-teens with a variety of afflictions, none crippling, but all of whic interferred with my physical development in some unforseeable way in adulthood. I had the usual complement of measles, mumps, and chickenpox which everyone had, but I had persistent, repetitive strep throat infections, complicated by polio and rheumatic fever. I had surgery to remove tonsils and adenoids before I was 10

Neither I nor my family, friends, or doctors in those dark, distant days made the connection between all those illnesses and the open sewer that was Lake Erie, and/or the Rocky River in Cleveland in the 50s, wherein we disported happily, swimming and splashing--and swallowing. Polio is, of course, transmitted through fecal matter which I must have ingested through that filthy water. 

When I reached 18, I was pretty happy that I had lived long enough to leave home, growing in confidence that I was "playing with house money."

 I've always been an 'employment' opportunist, doing whatever came along, and as such I shall undoubtedly perish, but which has led to many ventures and careers I couldn't EVER have foreseen. I followed no career paths. Just about everything I did prior to earning the PhD (in Education) in 1989 was decidedly "ad hoc." 

That included gigs working as a stage hand at the Opera as a teen, work in broadcasting and newspapers, humping beer at Raider games in Oakland, a hitch in the military (USAF), selling cars, a two-year stint in public relations, some 10 years in construction as a carpenter, and I finished my working life as a professor and instructor, and then 'retired' to work as a landlord and of necessity a handyman.

NONE of it was the result or consequence of either ambition or plan, but it seems to have worked out okay.

What ARE They So Afraid Of?

 In another dicussion, someone asked "What are White people so aftaid of?"
Legit question. Folk ethnology might suggest the following description:

The aristocracy, of course, fears the dilution of their power. Hegemony gets trickier when the field's mined the same way for everybody abs NOBODY knows where. They sing paeans to competition, but they hate, fear, and always try to eliminate it wherever they can. It's all about mergers and acquisitions. 

The hoi-poloi are legitimately terrified over losing their cultural/social status and advantages by which--and ONLY by which--they have historically distinguished themselves from those whom they scorn and detest.
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AND... They're either authentically afraid of "retribution" befalling them for harboring and extolling their toxic racism so tightly and for so long, or that's what they've been convinced of, by fascists who masterfully manipulate propaganda, the Big Lies, and wackloon conspiracies to keep the morons in line. 

I  think wealthy Whites view oncoming parity as nothing more than an inconvenience, because they'll still have all the wealth for DECADES to come. 

Final Disposition of the Fairness Doctrine

 RIP Fairness Doctrine, Pah-leeeze!

Far from promoting informative exchanges, the fabled, bemoaned, lamented and sanctified "Fairness Doctrine" PREVENTED controversy and "dangerous" dialog on air, because it required that stations programming "opinions" HAD to provide FREE air time to opponents.

Needless to say, NO Program Director wanted to have to explain to the Station Manager giving away free air-time just to "air out laundry," as one PD explained it to me when I worked in the industry in the 60s an 70s.

Cable TV and Rupert Murdoch killed the Fairness Doctrine.

It became irrelevant with the furious metastasis of non-"broadcast" media like cable and the Intertubez..

HRC, Post-mortem

 I gladly, happily, hopefully voted for Hillary Clinton, even though she was and still is hated.

There's a reason for it; that hatred isn't accidental. It's been generated by the Righturds for 30 years.

She's hated because of the ever-willing, mysogynist press that's been generated by the concerted and concentrated mysogynistic attacks since she was First Lady.

That's when the GOPhux establishment and the Vast, Right-Wing Conspiracy recognized her intelligence, toughness and ambition and set out, before the Clintons had even really settled in to the White House to sabotage her.

She's a remarkable person. I met her once. HRC was the best-prepared, most capable presidential candidate since FDR, but the 'purists' wanted their own, doddering, ideological septuagenarian. Be glad for the sake of your illusions that Bernie was never subjected to serious Oppo attacks of the sort with which HRC was tarred sine the 90s.

Nobody in modern history has been investigated more often, more thoroughly, on so many matters and no one hasz more often been wholly and so thoroughly exonerated.

We, as a country, missed a greater chance than anyone has yet imagined or acknowledged.