Choice is a miracle

Everything gives
off of a certain
kindness of light,
if you would
but have the will
to see as much
as the eye of mind
would feel
of this warmth,
or know
what is real
in illumination.

That one
better candle,
you keep burning
inside,
is what makes
the giving heart
that would
love too much
for any blinding
black to curse
the darkness
we make all
about ourselves.

Find the connection
every day
to feel
what is always
resonant
with the right
mind of reflection
all around you.

Meaning is
fleeting, so
always be
ready to let go
and trust
in your faith
of self
and its part
in the place
of so much
divine process,
making and being
more
with wondrous friction.

The pain will be just
as fleeting
as the pleasure,
and just
as necessary.
That's the rub
you see
that is
giving, life as
the miracle of choice
and
what light or dark
we make of it.

Willfully Wanting What We Will

Will you
will what
you want
or
want what
you will.
The work
of what work
will want
or
of what
want will work.

What will be
gauged as gain
or
gain be gauged
as will.
How do we teach
the gratification
of will
as well as
the gratification
of want.

How do we delay
what we want
to teach
what we will,
giving
our children the want
of a stronger will?

Here's where will
will be the rub
of our tread
meeting the road
less traveled,
and how we wield
the wheel of will
and how to want
real metal
to the peddle
of go.

JUST A THOUGHT

Sea going aircraft carriers are obsolete. They need to be replaced by mile long dirigible trains.

These trains would be made up of hybrid dirigible blimps like the design you see pictured below. Such trains would become a combination assault drone, AWACS, and logistics platform.

They would be protected by swarms of Drimes, or drone proximity mines. There would litteraly be thousands of these, say, 5 to 10 kilo Drimes surrounding the train. The train would support them by deploying tethered recharge/control nodes that would be set up to handle the recharge turnaround of something on the order of 50 to 100 Drimes.

The Drimes themselves would employ a claymore type, shrapnel explosive, with active directional control, to provide the best bang to payload ratio, while still allowing for significant battery load.

Such Max-Tac (or maximum tactical) train platforms would be able to loiter indefinitely at 30 to 40 thousand feet because any Drib (dirigible blimp) segment would be capable of independent flight. As such, end Dribs could attach and reattach as needed for resupply on an ongoing basis. And if the military could come up with some form of reusable, steerable, parafoil drop pallet for 50 to 100 ton loads, the system would be complete.

Like I said. Just a thought.

CHANGE IS COMING WHETHER WE WANT IT OR NOT

This statement is true because of the inherent contradictions of this economy. Those contradictions will bring it down no matter what reforms are attempted. 

The contradictions revolve around several quite absurd factors that now make up electrified Capitalism.

It is certainly true that the abundance of things that vastly more efficient production has provided allows for a bewildering array of purchase choices. 
The problem for this improved producing engine is not that it doesn't churn out lots of new things (which can do more than ever before), but that the system can't both pay enough across the board to keep consumption going, while still providing the sufficiently fat profit margins owners of capital demand. 

The global matrix of total productive potential is so large, and always growing, that it forces an insane spiral of increasing competition. A cycle played out so that the players can maintain the hope that they can win the game of market advantage. As such, pretty much the only place left to cut costs are in the area of wet ware; you either use less of it, and/or you pay what you do use less. And therein lies the rub; the impossibility of having a tremendous supply side, and an impoverished demand side at the same time.

That would be bad enough, but then you have two other factors that are also at play here. The insane, totally saturating environment of engineered message that forever screams out BUY! As well as the impossibility of having livelihoods based on jobs whose only justification for existence is to make things to be purchased. Not only does this have the already described economic contradiction, it assumes a posture of resource consumption that can be sustained indefinitely; even as that consumption rate continues to increase.

That engineered message environment is part and parcel of not only why every part of our mental life is ever more screwed with, it is also why we have made such a complete disaster out of the idea of representative Democracy. 

I mean seriously? Believable representation in the age of super virtualized facade? If that's not like the oxymoron of "Reality TV" then I don't know what is.

The bottom line here is that what we have now is not only driving us insane, it is fundamentally unstable as an objective processing system. There are so many growing contradictions, both within and without, that there is absolutely no way it can sustain itself by any other means than to become the most authoritarian, and repressive kind of enforced governance we've ever seen. There is simply no other way it can survive.

We have a choice as to how we will confront the change that is coming. That choice boils down to whether we're willing to demand an alternative to Capitalism, or just wait to see which form of really unpleasant we're going to be forced to deal with.

#CapitalismIsObsolete

The Salon article:

  

7 facts that show the American dream is dead

A GENERATION WASTED EITHER WAY?

I am always confronted by a significant sense of ambivalence when I see well intended organizations like "The GroundTruth Project" identify, and seek to address issues as important at this.

On the one hand, how can any sane society, or collection of societies, allow such vast swaths of their children to become an ill prepared, and thus hardly utilized, fundamental aspect of our future. This is not eating your seed corn, it is watching it get bounced out onto the road side, the rest of us not being able to stop, and so leaving it there to be ground into the mud of an increasingly mired track.

Surely we can applaud any effort to channel investment in not only education, but the infrastructure that would allow them to make use of that knowledge. And to a certain extent I can cheer this kind of effort on, but the difficulty for me to do so wholeheartedly starts in the very way such problems are discussed, even by "The GroundTruth Prodject" as this story illustrates.

You see it in the way it expresses the issue: talking about the waste in terms of lost tax revenue from the wages not earned. You also see it generally in most discussions about economic problems; that any difficulty is weighed in terms of lost potential revenues placed against the costs of whatever investments might be needed to address the difficulty. And of course, this is also where you start getting stuck in the sticky cross arguments of who should bear the solution costs.

That, certainly, is bad enough, but I can't help taking the view point back a bit to an even bigger frame of reference. As in what we're really talking about when we think of the opportunity for which we want to have all of this youthful potential applied to.

I know what the idealized notion is presented as: new scientists to discover important cures, or more efficient techniques. New engineers to design the application of those techniques... And so on.

And certainly there would be at least some of that.

The more accurate reality, however, would be to recognize that the majority of these creative minds would be pushed through the sieve of market/commodity necessity. A sieve that, given the capricious nature of value that is the hallmark of Capitalism, would punish and/or seduce their talent into process creation and maintenance that is anything but connected to who we are as human beings, and how we should be relating to each other.

What I am talking about here is the world where creativity is applied to all of the superfluous aspects of marketing; all of the manipulations of our basic nature: love, desire, status, and the fears easily stoked of not having them. All of the message engineering, product packaging and need creation inherent in working on those fears. 

And marketing is just the start because that capricious sieve also pushes talent towards whatever else is valued in the abstract; because if it sells it is good: Drugs that cure only big market diseases, and preferably if they're only easy variations of current patents; drugs that only treat life stress symptoms; drugs that only mask life stress symptoms, pleasurably or otherwise. New products that provide both killer profits as well whatever number of lethal, unintended side affects. It doesn't really matter.

And lastly, maybe even most importantly, is the idea that life has be be organized as a factory in the first place. That we have to be cut off from each other not only by arbitrary task boundaries, but by the very nature of emphasized self interest; whether that "self" is the individual process owner, or the group thus employed. A cutting off that makes cooperation and shared needs nearly impossible to establish.

It is also that factory model, and the consumption of commodities to justify production, and thus livelihoods, that puts us at such odds with the natural world we're supposed to be truly living in, as opposed to just existing; eating, working, using, procreating, and defecating.

It is in this factory model, and the shopping sprawl that surrounds it, that the wage slave, and salary drone, runs along on as an endless moving tread; a tread that never ceases to increase in speed. The only purpose being to do more for less and thus out sell the other guy; accumulate more counters as more advantage and then get bigger.

Is this truly the way to be offering a means for each new wave of children to have a chance at a better life? Should we be surprised at all that so many are flying off of the accelerating treadmill? For my part I don't thinks so. There simply has to be a better way.

This is why I am so firmly convinced that Capitalism is well past its "use by" date. It has gone more than just sour in this new electrified environment we now live in. It absolutely must be replaced. Lets use this abundant pool of talent to help us figure out what the alternative should be composed of, as well as getting it implemented. That is something I think that would be truly worthy of them. 

#CapitalismIsObsolete

The nbcnews.com story:

If millennials Continue to Stumble, our Economy will fail

DOES A VOTER NOW HAVE REAL CHOICE?

Let's be clear here. Disenfranchisement of any group within a Democracy is intolerable. It is injustice pure and simple.

What concerns me, however, as the Republicans engage in this ridiculous "voter fraud" crusade (chasing a chimera of their own making), is how it diverts us from a more fundamental issue: Even if there were no impediments to everyone voting, are we really being given a meaningful choice?

"Dark Money" is becoming the game of choice these days, and even though the Republicans may a current lead, are the Democrats all that far behind? Have they been all that far behind in the last eight years or so?

You really have to ask yourselves if Big Money really cares all that much about which party is in power. Some of it might, as the Koch brothers might have you believe, but its hard to see why B.M. has had any reason to complain with the Dems these last two presidential campaigns. 

Virtually no body went to jail for the "Great Depression." Any more than most of them failed to make out like bandits when the dust finally settled. And it would also be quite difficult to argue that their hands have been tied as far as initiating another round of "speculate against the rubes" goes.

There is only one game in town. And because of the "inequality of outcomes" that electrified Capitalism ensures (money becoming the same thing as information so limiting the free flow of same), it is a game that is rigged from top to bottom.

This is why Capitalism is obsolete. This is why we must come up with an alternative. An alternative where we govern ourselves as well as take over the management of production. 

#CapitalismIsObsolete

The Salon article:

GOP's maniacal new vote scheme: What wing nuts are hatching to keep the riffraff away

HOW LOW CAN IT GO

Actually, this election is about something; what is probably the default subtext for all of them: The ability of these clowns to push how relevant they are to creating meaningful policy ever lower.

The real question is why anybody would expect anything else. This is, after all, government as "Reality TV" and, as such, it is the producers, with the hacks they employ to write the scripts, who have the last word in where the course of policy will get plotted. Where the producers, in this context, are the captains of capital who are not only ever more certain in their conceit of the value they create, but of their inherent right to be in charge of the show in the first place.

And lest you have any doubt about this fact just remember that "Dark Money" is soon to surpass ordinary influence spending. That this will also soon go over the billion dollar mark for every cycle is almost as depressing as how even that realization is becoming old news.

The bottom line here is that the fault lies with us. If we cannot find a way to take action and stop doing business as usual; stop playing the money game, this farce will continue. Just because its the only game in town doesn't mean we can't figure out a better one, and then make it happen.

#CapitalismIsObsolete.

The Daily Beast article:

Why DC wants an election about nothing