Give a hoot, y'all!

Here’s what I heard Joe Blow say the other day while I was trying to stay awake during the Super Bowl.

All this trouble in the world--it aint just gonna go away by itself. You know, it goes back a long ways.

For one thing, Catholic Church dominated European life and culture for over a thousand years. And for the most part they meant well (I know; I used to be one of ‘em)

But after a thousand years they (we) needed some corrections.

Long about the 1700’s, some new Reason-cultivating fellers came along—the so-called Enlightenment—and they ushered in a new way of thinking about everything . . . and they brought to the forefront a lot of profound questions, like . . .

Who should be in charge of things, what’s wrong or right about the way things are working out for everybody, what needs to be changed, why hasn’t God straightened everything out, who or what is God anyway? Maybe we’d be better off just to do without Him for awhile and figure this stuff out on our own.

By ’n by and moving right along . . .modern life in the so-called “West” began to be constructed on the ruins of Catholic Europe, as thinking people attempted to reconstruct society according to a reconstructed humanistic ole Greek/Roman way of analysis and ponderation.

And then came along science, duh, let’s not forget the rise to prominence of modern science . . .

analytical thinking with hypothetical testing to determine what is true or not true, what works or does not work.

And humanizing ethics . . . who gets fed and who doesn’t, who’s fat ’n happy and who ain’t . . .

Who’s in charge of this mess, anyway?

Well, must not be God. If there was any validity to that theory, those religious potentates and their blue-blooded partners in mime have pretty well got everything messed up, and how the hell can we fix everything. . . how can we get things turned around so that everybody gets an appropriate piece of the pie, piece of the action, their fifteen minutes of fame blah blah blah

Long about 1830, a couple of German guys, Marx and Engels figured out that what needed to happen was the folks who were actually cranking up all the factories, turning the nuts and bolts, churning out all them goods . . . those proletarians needed to take unto themselves control of the means of production and rearrange everything so that everybody would get pretty much the same, or at least something more like the same amount of life’s essential necessities  and let’s all get together and toss the rich folks on their asses and get this thing turned around.

Then, lo and behold, a  certain cadre of them revolutionaries managed to get a hold of a country—and a pretty damn big one at that—Russia, and start the work of getting the world turned around to their way of thinkin’ …

and now we know how all that turned out . . . between the Bolsheviks running the Czar out of town in 1917 and the Wall going down in 1989, there were a hell of a lot of water under the bridge, blood under the ground, and underground gulags and criminations that got imposed on millions of world citizens and it wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t right and its a good damn thing them Soviets finally came to their senses, and even the Maoists even got eclipsed when Deng started to get the middle kingdom turned around and all that mess is still being worked out, even up to the present-day shaking off of Chavez and now the world is finally learning its lesson about all that totalitarian nonsense—

and that goes for you alt-right fascists and nazis too! Don’t you get any ideas about takin’ over, cuz we learned that lesson the damned hard way when that demonic fool with the weird little moustache dragged us into hell on earth for four years.

It took us many millions killed and a whole damn world war to get all that straightened out. And then another half-century of frigidity before all them spies from both sides came in from the Cold etcetera etcetera.

But nothin’s ever simple. It all just keeps going on and on and who knows how will end?

Maybe apocalypse; I don’t know. Could happen though.

Now in the 21st-century horizon arises this new ideology surrounding the notion that we humans should all get together and nullify our 200-year-old carbon-spewing habits real quick like in the blinkin of an eye so to speak according to the pronouncements of technocratic experts who take unto themselves the means of production, so to speak, (well shut my mouth! as we used to say down south) so’s we don’t carbonize ourself and our homo sapiens selves into obliteration!

Don’t get me wrong. Give a hoot, I say I say: Don’t pollute!

Let’s all pitch in and get this planet cleaned up, y’all. Truly. I’m not making this up.

But we don’t need to be jerking everybody’s human rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of mobility) to do it. I think we can undertake this climate change conundrum with a little common sense and maybe even some democratized republicized consensus on what needs to be done.

Like I said before: Give a hoot; Don’t pollute, y’all!

And hey, good luck with that! More power (but not too much) to ya. Just shut my mouth! if I’ve stayed stepped on anybody’s toes.

Not really. Freedom of Speech and all that . . .

Glass Chimera

The killing of God

Just because the potentates of old Europe wrangled the Bible away from its Hebrew roots and turned it into dead religion doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist.

God did, after all, create humans with a free will. We are not programmed bots. Just because we homo sapiens screwed it up over the course of a few thousand years doesn’t mean that God wasn’t in the midst of it all somewhere, trying to break through our cerebral density, carnal shenanigans and political bullshit.

Actually, God did break through. But look what we did to him.

In the Middle Eastern crossroads where our wayward cruelties had taken advantage of 1st-century Empire-building power politics to nail him, a stake was driven in the ground. It turned out to be a bloody mess and a sacrifice of universal proportions.

So, as the centuries rolled by, the movers and the shakers among us took that bloody sacrifice and ran with it, transformed it into a first-class religious system that rolled on through time and continent like a runaway ox-cart on a roman road. A thousand years later, we’d manhandled that pivotal sacrifice into high-powered religion, through which men and women worldwide were either convinced or manipulated (depending upon your interpretation of it) into the mysteries of practiced religion.

Long about 1500 ad dominum, a few upstart readers who were paying attention to the original scripts started to figure out that something had gone wrong somewhere along the line.

So they raised some issues. Well, long story short, all hell broke loose.

That great institutional juggernaut that had rolled down through a millennium of pox humana religiosity suddenly was under attack from men who were trying to get to the bottom of it all, which is to say . . . trying to get through all that institutional religiosity to . . . the truth.

The truth? What is truth?

Haha glad you asked.

This little question became a matter of serious debate.

Now that the snake was out of the bag, everybody and their brother was trying to figure out what the truth really was and how it should be used to improve the human condition. People like Rousseau, Hegel, Engels and Marx, Lenin and several other notorious bastards.

As the movement to replace God with human wisdom and government gathered steam, human history heated up quite a bit. And the conflagration of it increased exponentially because this historic development just happened to coincide with the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. So we had a lot more fire power to implement all the big changes that needed to happen in order to get mankind delivered from the great religious debacle that had held us in bondage for so long.

Some guys in Prussia figured out that, since the great juggernaut institution of religion had been exposed to be the manipulative Oz-like empire that it was, the immediate conclusion was that not only had we killed religion, but we humans had managed to finally kill God! Voltaire, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche made this point perfectly clear.

Several bloody revolutions and a couple of world wars later, we are in the process now of finally getting our ducks in a row and ourselves straightened out, now that we’ve finally gotten God out of the way.

Even though we had already killed him one time before, but that’s another story.

Actually, it’s The Story.

His-story.

You can’t kill it, because that death-sentence strategy has already been implemented several times, yet without conclusive results.

We humanos insist on perpetually resurrecting that Story. We just can’t get enough of the un-killable presence among us. It refuses to stay dead. Might be worth looking into.

 

King of Soul

The life song of J Alfred Bourgeois

We've worked hard for what we've got;

maybe we're smart and maybe we're not.

Thanks to the courage of long-dead soldiers,

we can grow and prosper and manage to get older.



We've read about .gov by the people, republics, and democracy;

we try to stay decent, clean, and free from hypocrisy.

And yes, we've heard of that Marx guy, and Lenin and whatnot.

but I'm here to say we aint no proletariat.



We don't wanna change the world;

we like stars and stripes in the breeze unfurled.

Dinner on Sundays, work on Mondays, weekends for fun days;

this is what we like, and cultivate in predictable ways.



Jefferson said let's do .gov by the peoples.

We say along with that came letting folks raise their steeples.

Marx, on the other hand said we need dictatorship of the proletariat,

but this home-making bourgeois boy giveth not a plug nickel for all that.



We're happy to be plain ole boojwazee,

with a washer, dryer, car, and a home someday mortgage-free.

There are plenty out their who wanna die for the Cause;

we just like living in freedom under reasonable laws.

Glass half-Full

Communism

It was an idea whose time had come
or so they thought.
First there was the original, the Marx
version.
It seemed to be a great idea, everybody equal
pulling their own weight in a
great society. You might say it was the French
philosophers who started the whole damn thing
when they sliced off the king’s head
in the Place de la Revolution, 1789
to, you know, get him and his royal legions
out of the way
so Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite could
rule the day
instead of the divine right of fuddy-duddy
kings
which was an old disproven
notion. It had fallen, like the guillotine upon the king,
by the wayside. Later,
When the Bolsheviks got a hold of it
it became something else, and so
there evolved the Russian
version
which morphed into the Lenin
version
and eventually degenerated into the bloody Stalin
purge version
Then of course there was the Chinese
version
which, when Mao got a hold of it became
some great bloody leap backward and
a cultural revolution the likes of which the world
had never seen
since Pharoah, or whoever the hell it was that collected
all those sweating men out in the desert to stack
stone upon Ozymandian stone
up to the sky
but who knows why.
But I digress. It was the Ho Chi Minh
version
that really tripped us Americans up because
that great idea whose time had come had
proven to be not such a great idea
or so we thought.
And the whole damned ideological notion of
Communism
had become a terrible bogey man, an ogre in
the furtive minds of Capitalist men that
eventually got mired in the bogs of
Vietnam
And what a helluva thing that was.
Oh, and while all that was going down
along came the Che
version
and then the Castro
version
but the jury’s still out on all that or
so it seems,
‘though things are never as they
seem.
Maybe it was all just a bad
dream.

Smoke

From earth Mining to bitcoin Mining

There was this earth and it had rock underneath, stratified thick n thin, and air above, stratified thick n thin, thick down low and thin up high.

Folkses lived on the earth, and they were distributed throughout, thick here and thin there, here and yon, to and fro. Folkses hunted some animals and raised others, and they tilled the earth to gather food and they mined it to get gold and iron and whatnot and what have you.

Now as the earth itself is stratified, so the folkses themselves got stratified, not that they tried to do it that way but it just happened and so they classified themselves into castes and classes and income brackets and so on and so forth, some with thick wallets and some with thin, thick n thin, and then. . .

By n by long about hunderd fifty year ago this old boy Marx figured out a thing or two bout the stratifications of them folkses, and he determinated that them that owns the means of production to make all the goods gets all the gold and all the assets and all das kapital and so forth and so on and dem proletariat and dem bourgeoisie jez get what dey can while dey can get it.

By n by just up the street from where Marx used to sit in the round room of the british library and figure out all that bout the means of production and who owns it and how all that power accumulates to them 1%ers and how maybe the proletariat could get stirred up and take the means of production unto themselves and then foment a dictatorship of the proletariat. . .

Well, jez few blocks up from where ole Marx used to sit in the round room of the british library, somewhere like bloomsbury or doonesbury or what not, this ole boy Keynes figured out that money was circulatin all around between the thick and the thin and it was just kinda going by itself and if you took the gold or whatever basis for value out from under it the whole dam thing would jez. . .

keep goin round and round, like it didn't need no backin.

By n by the Fed got cranked up and started crankin out money from thick assets outa thin air, thick n thin, you know,

and dips come and peaks go and capital gets invested dontcha know and after bout a hunderd years of that up n down high n low thick n thin hi and hi de ho,

By n by, long after jethrotull played thick as a brick and twiggy got thin as air, the blame got thick and the money got thin and global warming or climate change as their calling it now became the new sin,

the Global Warming degenerators got together in Warsaw to implicate the Global Warming developators for high crimes of casting carbon spells on mankind, and to milk their guilt for damages and to blame them developators for all the shit thick thats goin down and the thin hot air carbon that be goin up,

and so jez like Marx back in the day rappin bout the means of Capital production and dictatorship of proletariat and so on and so forth, now be the time for the 1%ers to ante up for their culpability in the means of Carbon production

jez like wall street and them 1%ers together with dem hot air politicians blowin up balloons inflatin the stratosphere with derivatives and CDOs CreditDefaultSwaps and MBSs and generally BS,

jez as the 1%ers was pullin some serious thick money out o thin air, inflatin all the value of fiat currencies and so on and so forth. . .

Jez about dat time, along come Satoshi Nakimodo and he come up wid idea, like Keynes wid de money thang, dat folkses can mine bitcoins out of thin air, or from their algorithms and online electrons, all charged up like their bankcards, and so on and so forth, jez like back in the day when dey usa mine gold and iron and whatnot and what have you and so forth, but no matta what happen dey still be stratified and de rich get rich and de po get po, and so forth an so on.

And that's the way it was, November 20, 2013. Now, where it go from here who knows, but we do know this: the thick gets theirs and the thin gets theirs and all is still stratified, but who is satisfied? You gotta go out an get it honey cuz it aint gon jez come to ya. But hey, God bless the child that got his own, cuz in de long run God be de only one dat can give satisfaction, so pray bout it.

Glass Chimera

Wealth Distribution

Karl Marx said religion is the opiate of the people. He must have noticed that its believers were generally more prone to forgive the wicked than to overthrow them. But Marx had formed his theories long before the narcoticizing power of the televesion age, which neutralizes the masses with affordable luxury and meaningless pop culture . You can't organize a dictatorship of the proletariat among a herd of virtual contented cows.

What the revolutionaries really need to redistribute bourgeois wealth is a herd of boshevik bulls who can throw their weight around in the delicately stratified china shop of societal order. But the problem for revolutionaries in north America has always been that the bulls--the real movers and shakers-- sided early on with the capitalists, and they all ended up on wallstreet building productive companies and prosperous portfolios, instead of revolutions.

Although the revolutionaries are loath to admit it, the capitalist system has actually distributed wealth quite broadly and plentifully during the last hundred and twenty years or so.

That wave of growing prosperity, unprecedented in world history, has not been distributed equally. Broadly and plentifully, yes, but not equally. This is nothing new; wealth accumulation has never in human history been egalitarian. And it never will be, no matter what the professor says, no matter what the Occupy speaker in the public square says.

While the bulls have been kicking up gold dust on wall street for a couple of centuries, mom and pop were setting up shop down on main street catching a piece of the action. That's how it has been in north America.

The fact that the system now fails to deliver goods and services at levels previously enjoyed is undeniable. Suddenly, in the space of a few years, there doesn't seem to be enough wealth to go around. But we the people are not powerless. I prefer to believe we can act, individually and collectively, in love and kindness, and yes--in peace and self-control-- toward every person, and every group of persons we meet.

Many millenia ago, a fearless speaker spoke about a coming Messiah. Isaiah prophecied that the promised one would "judge the needy with righteousness. With justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his mouth he will slay the wicked."

I, a Christian believer, am willing to await Messiah's decision on these matters of justice, instead of taking matters into my own sinfully selfish hands. That position renders me as "religious" in the eyes of a secularly evolving world.

Now I've keyed up enough here for one Sunday morning session at Starbucks. I'll take a walk, one block along Georgia Street to the art museum, where the Occupy Vancouver crowd gathers. Let's see what those who claim to speak for the 99 have to say about the one.

Glass Chimera