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my humble opinion

Open Thread - 11-01-24 - More Cowbell

"I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell".

~ Bruce Dickinson aka Christopher Walken

Four more days. Four more days of the overtly loud and incessant drone of cowbell in our ears.

Imagine, if you will:

An overweight American media, gut hanging out over a strained belt line, with disregard for the consequences of their ululations and stomach jiggling gyrations, calls out in multi point harmony for a more divergent version of a well known sound track. A track about "The Reaper", replete with fear of "the other", and with overtones of cataclysmic repercussions of a miscast vote in the most important election of all time, immemorial.

A "fevered" uniparty studio producer driven by an expedient need to subvert the arrangement of a score laid down long ago, from a different time and a different place, proclaims with a wink and a nod to the duopoly: "Don't be burdened by what has been, let us make cowbell great again" as his lips flutter and twist while talking from both sides of his mouth. His job, besides his bank account's bottom line, is choreographing your thoughts into a leitmotif of fascist and nazi symbolism. Like a conductor he points his baton to the left and then to the right which results in a discordant cacophony of noise that rises above the signal as it crescendos into a chorus of hatred towards one another.

The American polity, divided by a classic standard gone awry, are split into camps that want to leave the song as they remember it and those that want to embellish its rhythmic aspects, in an oppositional dichotomy of status quo versus change. The cowbell represents a new normal, an instrument of change. It's a producer's tool. Its purpose is not so much to change the song as it is to bend the will of the listener. And to keep the listeners divided, like a two channel stereo output, ultimately, combined into a singular monophonic output source.

And the cowbell drones on.

Tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink.

cowbell.jpg

Open Thread - 10-25-24 - Campaigns of Fear

Wow! Can you believe the fear that's being ginned up in this election? Sure, fear is a big factor in every election but this one is over the top. Who, that are old enough to have lived through it, can forget the nuclear blast ad from the 1964 election. That visual may not be aired this election cycle, but it sure is implied.

Fear is the tool of the powerful, and those that covet power.

It resides in the amygdala, also known as the lizard brain. As a primal emotion its function is fight or flight, or to put it another way, a preservation device.

Fear has been used by the powerful probably since the advent of social cohesion, the main advantage of humans living in groups is safety, the prime motivation after food and water.

The fear today is palpable. From all political sides of the power spectrum. Civil war, nuclear war, violent riots, financial ruin, martial law, cancel culture, prison for misinformation, on and on. We are inundated with that which tickles the lizard brain. Have you noticed that folks are being lead around by their noses?

Open Thread - 10-18-24 - Turtles All the Way Down

Ever have those strange moments when surrealism temporarily supplants reality? Like a certain moment in time isn't real and you question it really happening? You feel outside of yourself like you're in another dimension? Here's an example.

That's happened to me several times in the past, but I've been feeling that way many times during the last four or five years, like all this really isn't happening. How can it be that life has changed so quickly? It seems like the change hasn't been organic, that some surreal hand has directed it all. Like it hasn't happened naturally, like it's all been orchestrated.

I wonder, have all great societal changes happen this way?

Things are weird and keep getting weirder. Like an infinite regression of weirdness. Like turtles stacked one upon another, holding up a flat earth.

Turtles_all_the_way_down.png
Attribution: Wikimedia Commons

Open Thread - 10-11-24 - World War III: Causus Belli?

Are the proxy wars in Ukraine and the Mideast about propping up the failing US dollar and world hegemony?

Yes, probably, but with a caveat.

In a world that is experiencing resource depletion and most probable peak oil, what will be the most valuable resource in the near future?

World War III will be about oil and gas. It's all about energy, the lifeblood of world economies, and those who would be king of the world.

chess.jpg
Attribution: Pixabay

Open Thread - 09-27-24 - Landfall

As you read this my wife and I will be on our way to the gorgeous white sand and blue waters of Gulf Shores, Alabama.

We really lucked out on this one. Gulf Shores is just a hop, skip and a jump from Hurricane Helene's landfall in the panhandle of Florida. I hope those folks over there in the Big Bend area will be OK. Helene was a Cat. 4 when it hit the shore, it's a big one.

The area east of the hurricane is getting hammered as well. There's massive rain and wind over Florida, and it will move up into Georgia and the Appalachians. To the west of the hurricane, where Gulf Shores is, will be pretty calm and quiet. Like I said, we really got lucky on this one, a little wobble to the west and our vacation will have been much different, as in nonexistent.

It was a nail biter all week tracking the hurricane and it's a relief that we get to go, but at the same time we feel guilty in our pleasure knowing what those folks are going through just a short distance away. A hurricane, Beryl, went right over the top of us in Southeast Texas a few months ago. It made landfall south of Houston as a Cat. 1 hurricane and by the time it went over us it was just a tropical storm, but that was bad enough. There was flooding, trees down everywhere and we were without electricity for 6 days. That, I'm sure, is nothing compared to what folks are going through beneath Helene.

Hopefully everyone got to high ground.

Helene.jpg
More below the fold.

Open Thread - 09-20-24 - Waiting for the Sun

The Double-edged Sword of Technology

This is the strangest life, I've ever known. -Jim Morrison

Daedalus told his son Icarus: Don't fly too close to the sun or it will melt your wings and into the sea you will plummet. Don't fly too low or your wings will collect water and into the sea you will plunge.

Yet, Icarus in his exuberance flew too high and paid the toll of greed, ambition and hope with his life.

There is but one thing on this earth that comes close to matching the power of the sun. We as a species, as a country, as a polity are forgoing Daedalus's warning of balance between the extremes. Madmen are in the throes of greed and ambition in lieu of hope, as we potentially soar ever closer to our metaphorical watery cortege.

Icarus1.jpg
Attribution: Wikimedia Commons

Open Thread - 08-30-24 - Post Constitutional America

Where are we headed in this country, post Constitution? Have you given it any thought?

The US Constitution is one of the most, if not the most, enlightened documents in the history of mankind. It was meant to curtail the power of the federal government, to keep it in check. Notice I used the word "was" since it seems like there no longer are any checks on our government.

inverted constitution.jpg
Constitution (Preamble) in Distress - Inverted by JtC
Attribution: Pxhere

Open Thread - 08-23-24 - The Rub

What result would you expect from the nexus of big money and the mainstream media in our electoral process? Big money invests in protecting big money and the media invests in making big money for the media. Big money seems to be the common denominator on this grease slickened mobius strip of an election process, wouldn't you say?

Would this current circus of an election not be the natural evolutionary point of that amalgamation of greed, deceit and avarice?

:26

Open Thread - 08-16-24 - Democracy and the Democratic Party

Have you asked yourself where this is all headed?

I spent most of my life as a staunch Democrat. Raised in a blue family in a blue city in a blue state. I voted straight line Democrat starting in 1972.

The years of Republican rule, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush solidified my Democratic Party convictions.

Than along came Bill Clinton and after 12 years of Republican control I was ready for change. But, it didn't take long into his administration that I started to question it all. Clinton was a master of gaslighting the public. To me, that was the start of the Democratic Party's illiberal policies that have metastasized into the upside down party that we're dealing with today. They have lost their way.

How can a political party call themselves democratic, with a small d, when they do things like putting up a presidential candidate that no one has voted for? They do everything within their means to keep third party candidates off of state ballots. They've unleashed weaponized tech giants on their ideological opponents and non-conforming adherents. I thought democracy was about choice. Of course, all here know better, Bernie Sanders comes to mind. We are presented, election after election, with no real choices other than corporate lackeys that are only concerned about their own best interests.

Don't get me wrong, the Republicans are no better. In fact, they have helped in this climb to bastardized governance by playing a game of leapfrog with the opposition party that has contributed greatly to our current state of affairs. Every subsequent administration for decades has brought us closer to the constitutional crisis we are now facing. The constitutional crisis I speak of is the lack of adherence to said constitution. It is all but ignored by our supposedly duly elected leaders, and I say leaders with tongue in cheek.

inverted constitution.jpg
Constitution (Preamble) in Distress - Inverted by JtC
Attribution: Pxhere

Open Thread - 08-02-24 - Your Mind is on Vacation

Is there any doubt now?

The media controls the masses, especially television. I've written many times in the past about the war on our minds. The events from the past few weeks have brought the media's techniques front and center. It's on full display.

It's amazing how Joe Biden went from the greatest president ever to persona non grata overnight and Kamala Harris went from a ditzy air head to a media darling as they hang on every word she says much like Ernest T. Bass' crush on Miss Crump, the school teacher, on The Andy Griffith Show.

The average working stiff doesn't have the time to be well informed like we political junkies. They go to work in the morning, come home in the early evening and maybe have enough time to watch the evening news before dinner. That's not to mention the subtle political and social nudging proliferated on regular television programming. Ditto that for the written media and internet as well. The Bernays of the world recognize that situation and use it to its fullest extent and it obviously works. It seems rather easy to corral a mind when it's fenced in by short spurts of a short attention span. They are easy targets.

The human mind is malleable like a clump of clay longing to be formed into a useful piece of pottery. The media is the potter's wheel and the propagandist is the potter.

TV mind control.jpg
Attribution: MattysFlicks at PxHere

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