Pretty fucking dumb.

One of the most dazzling things about humans is their ability to simultaneously understand and not understand things.  AT THE SAME TIME!  

Boy, are they stupid!

Here’s an ideal example, which no one will ever remember after the first single millisecond of perfect, cosmic-diamond-bullet-in-the-brain comprehension.

Infinite growth is impossible in a finite world.  That goes for population growth and debt.  And yet, we’ve cantilevered EVERYTHING on the impossible.

Thank you for your time.

Now, go back to fornicating furiously, borrowing at interest, and bailing out the crooks who are too big to bail, jail, or fail.  I’ll be with you shortly.

I’ve been sort of following the “humans are selfish dicks” slash “humans are capable of true love” story for a while now, often as they are presented in game-theoretic analyses, e.g., Hawks, Doves, and Tit-for-Tats, but mostly in terms of animal behavior in general.  And I will give you one anecdote from my experience.

About 20 years ago I saw Chris Langton (Santa Fe Institute) give a talk on a genetic algorithm of cellular automata using Hawks, Doves, and Tit-for-Tats. (briefly, a genetic algorithm is like life, wherein generationally, “like begets like;” cellular automata are rules-based checkerboard squares: e.g., if neighbor black, then white; and hawks, doves, and tit-for-tats are what you’d expect: hawks are always aggressive, doves, always kind, and tit-for-tats are kind first, then retributive against hawkishness; over generations, certain proportions of hawks, doves, and tit-for-tats emerge; tit-for-tat always wins, btw.)

Anywho,

Tit-for-tats are known to win over pure Hawks or Doves.  The interesting thing to me was that when there were sufficient tit-for-tatters in the population, the Doves, true love, were maintained over tens of thousands of generations.  In other words, doves went undetected, because tit-for-tatters cannot discriminate the peaceniks from themselves (and don’t want to), due to their own initially peaceful strategy; however, it requires the strong presence of tit-for-tat against hawks, someone willing to go toe-to-toe with hawks, in order for true love to exist.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.  And Merry Christmas.

I’ve suspected for some time that booman was stove-piping White House talking points.

I don’t think it’s violating any trust to reveal to you that I receive both on and off-the-record correspondence from the White House. On most weekdays, I’ll get a few heads-up about things the White House thinks are important.

Actually, if booman considers himself any sort of independent analyst, it would be wrong not to disclose such access, so I actually give him credit for doing so, even if it was inadvertently via bragging.  To the extent that he actually remains quasi-independent is anyone’s guess.  I personally think he’s drunk the access koolaid, as they say, and that if his “analysis” becomes any more shallow, you won’t even be able to get your feet wet at the frog pond.

Listen to this slapdash attempt at explaining the ongoing Greatest Heist Ever:

Why does America have worse economic inequality than almost any other developed nation? Because of the Republican Party. It’s that simple. Why is the Republican Party the way it is? That’s a more complicated question.

In booman’s world, there’s no mention of Clinton, NAFTA, the WTO, Rubinomics, Glass-Steagall, the transpacific partnership, etc.  It’s “Republicans.  That simple.”

Or his explication of the list of things we can’t do, due to crazy Republicans:

In light of last night’s debacle in the House, what do you think the chances are that we can:

1) pass comprehensive immigration reform.

2) pass a stimulus bill focusing on infrastructure.

3) raise the debt ceiling.

4) pass any legislation to address climate change.

5) restrict sales of assault weapons and high capacity clips.

6) restore cuts in discretionary spending (other than military) that is reduced in the Sequester.

7) do sensible tax reform, including on the Doc Fix and the Alternative Minimum Tax?

You can add to this list anything else we need to do but won’t be able to do because the Republicans are crazy.

Yep.  Republicans are crazy.  Democrats have had their hands tied on gun control since the mid-seventies, and Obama never scuttled the Rio Earth summit.  The WTO and Kyoto had nothing to do with globalization and China’s use of coal.  Or outsourcing of jobs.  Or trade deficits.  Nope.  Nothing at all.

On Obama’s continually “folding like a tissue in the rainstorm:”

Critiques of President Obama’s negotiating style are certainly warranted, but the most boring thing in the world is the suggestion that the president is really a moderate Republican who wants to move the Democratic Party to the right and gut entitlements. We have control of half of Congress, and any suggestion that we can get 100% of what we want if only we are more inflexible is moronic. The only real debate is over what we are willing to give up, not whether or not we have to give anything up. So, progressives should put themselves in the shoes of a negotiator and ask themselves honestly what they are willing to sacrifice and what they want in return. This talk of rainbows and ponies needs to end.

Ladies and Gents, I am fucking psyched by this block-headed, self-proclaimed “progressive” bullshit of pushing Oh, Brother!’s  austerity agenda, and the ridiculous  “Who blinked first?” framing.  Blink, blank, blunk.  Obama!  

Now, booman ain’t stupid, in the sense that he does mine certain truths, but he speaks in the language of mountaintop removal: to get to that vein, you have to blow the top of your head off.  This is the same reason I recently accused BTD of ignorant slutness.  They know (I hope they know) better.

Did you ever stop to think that our problems in America are not partisan, but substantive?  Systemic?  Decades long structural problems that tower over party politics, partisan hackery and hemi-neglect?  Energy, trade, and investment deficits?  Resource wars?  Environmental collapse?  An American Ponzi economy/wealth pump beginning to run in reverse?

SCROTUS (Supreme Caver-to-Republicans Of The United States), the hare-brained economists and incontinent ubermensch master-class investment bankers have crashed the system (repeatedly), and as usual they are taking it out on the ever more penurious.  There are reasons for this, stupid liberals.  It’s Obama’s job to make penury “okay” with stupid liberals, and his performance on this “inside job” should garner him an Oscar.

Either booman (and his ilk) is stupid, or he thinks you’re stupid.  I don’t cotton either way.

Oh, Brother!’s got the stoopid libruls also supporting Kerry and Hagel.  Fer realz.  Jus’ like he got ’em to hooray HillBill’s attack on Libya, and givin’ bin Laden cement galoshes (We killed Dillinger!), etc..    Jus’ like he got ’em to support Kagan on SCOTUS, which sounds like an astringent to be used on porcelain after you FLOTUS or POTUS in the bathtub.  Next up, swear to god, he’ll get libruls to support Jamie Dimon at Treasury.  Stoopid libruls will draw a line in the sand and fight to the last stoopid librul on cutting Social Security to ribbons.  Swear.  To.  Fucking.  God.

Oh, and Syria has mobile weapons labs containing weapons of mass destruction!

This is your so-called “reality-based community” giving you the straight poop.

The “reality-based community” is as drugged-up and strung out on American Exceptionalism as any winger.

All they really want for Christmas is genetically modified orgasms, but it wasn’t the spermaceti they were after: their motives were mad.

Merry Times.

Look, I’ve made my foolish fondness for Armando known previously.  Dude is smart and can slug, body punches when he deems it appropriate.  I always liked him, even when he’s wrong.  What in hell does he think austerity is all about?  I refer him to Stirling Newberry.  Get your shit together buddy, you’re in a New World. As politically astute as you are?  That’s olden-times.  You’re in a New World of carrying capacity.  Change everything you are.

As much as I like you, get with it, Armando.

Dear God in Heaven and Yale University.

This former atheist (technically agnostic!) bows down to the Majesty of God.  Nay, I prostrate myself before His Almighty and Cruel Mockery, His Infinite Jest and Maligning of Humans, and beg His Tender Mercy:

Thou hast punkst and fuckst with me in such a way as to make Job hurl lunch.  Relieve me from the awful rowing toward Your Presence.  The starch-shirted graybeards in the Humanities program at my state college are relentlessly blown about limbo and boiling in pitch, now wondering if my riposte to Bishop Berkeley, extrapolating to the idea of perfection, was correct.  They now have their answer: I began with Mel Brooks, and imagined God, Himself, The Indisputable Master of Stand-Up.   Not only does God play dice with the universe, he is in reality Joseph Heller.

If you are going to hire David Brooks to pontificate on humility and modesty, then you must blow up another village in Afghanistan, which makes more sense, because then at least you have the goal of world domination.  

NYT did not say: BREAKING: A MILLION PLUS IRAQIS STILL DEAD!

As America indulges narcissistically in the deaths of school children at the hands of a young man deranged by his own mentally deranged society, I wonder, where is their great display of emotion for the millions of dead and displaced Iraqis after years of American wars and sieges. You know, the dead from the Iraq-Iran war, Operation Desert Storm (Stormin’ Norman!), the 500,000 dead Iraqi children from the sanctions Mdm. Albright thought were “worth it,” and the million or so dead from our most recent engagement, aka war crime, at the hands of Mssrs. Cheney, Rumsfeld, und Bush. Not to mention the ten bazillion other foreign places where American violence remains “incontinent,” so to speak, but more like “exploding shits.”

Mr. Obama, Master of Predator & Reaper Drones that kill children arbitrarily, and their funeral and medic and wedding parties, can go piss his tears up a rope.

At least Susan Rice got “torpedoed.”  Sloshy-assed, skank-assed ho.  Responsibility to protect, my ass.

I understand that nothing can shock your inured souls, for I too am made dust by self-pulverization at the brazenness of the lies, the vacuum of accountability, and public indifference…

…but allow me, for the fourteen-millionth time, to insist that, “Nobody could have predicted” financial parasitism:

“Through all of my experience, what I never contemplated was that there were bankers who would purposely misrepresent facts to banking authorities,” Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, said in a phone interview. “You were honor-bound to report accurately, and it never entered my mind that, aside from a fringe element, it would be otherwise. I was wrong.”

Apex parasites cheat.  Who knew?  Certainly not the Supreme Parasite, whose poor psycho’s [conscience?] requires immediate defibrillation.  Maybe a stun gun would do the trick.

However habituated I seem to be to their chronic lies, murder, and thievery, occasionally they throw me a medicine ball that hits my solar plexus just so, and I’m crumpled and breathless at the most ordinary thing.

Of all people!  Dishonest bankers?  Father!  Take my soul to heaven, now!

Chris Floyd is “re-orienting,” leaving blogspace, which is both a personal and public blow.  He has been a shard of glass refracting light in our increasingly dismal, pant-hooping world.  Everything he ever wrote was a diamond bullet in your brain, without violence or bloodshed.  Mere words.  A simple act of compassion.  I hope we could say that about ourselves, but allow my doubt.  

He leaves a burning sword.  

Super Heh^nth

About 5,000 police officers marched through the centre of Madrid on Saturday to protest salary cuts and the thinning of their ranks as Spain grapples with its sovereign debt crisis.

The officers, who had travelled from across Spain. rallied three days after the nation was gripped by a general strike over the austerity cuts. Health and education workers have already taken part in similar marches.

“Citizens! Forgive us for not arresting those truly responsible for this crisis: bankers and politicians,” read one banner held aloft by a line of officers as they marched to the interior ministry.

Let’s face it: That’s a big step from this:

These patterns will repeat across the US, as the crisis moves from periphery to core, so this is a good portent.  

Vayamos, dag-nabbit.

Now that The American Way of Life has dissipated into “shittin’ in a bucket” and “posting warning signs amid the debris,” (i.e., blogging), I hope y’all don’t get ALL up IN my shrimp shack for failing to deliver a righteous, “I told you so” now “kiss my rod,” rant, because my dominant mood of anger has been momentarily exhausted, and I am suffering greatly from the previously suppressed and incompatible, yet competing bout of laughter now enjoying a post-inhibitory rebound of god-defiant vengeance.  

It’s sort of like bursting out laughing at your father just as he doubles down on obedience training, insofar as you just can’t help your 10-year old self, even though such outrageous infidelity could well cause him to double down yet again.  I mean, laughing at authoritarianism rising when they are laying down the law; either they laugh with you, or they don’t.  Fortunately, my old man chose to laugh with me.  He was cross-eyed-spelunkered, but he laughed.

The analogy extends to the fact that you don’t even know why you’re laughing in such an ill-timed manner.  Maybe laughing in the face of death is a displacement behavior, a nervous tic, like ducks pulling grass before a big territorial brouhaha, or repeatedly tying one’s shoes after Bjarney of Hof’s sword really bites into your shield for the first time.  Sure, you’d heard rumors of how he went overboard and killed all his relatives that one time, but when he took a large chunk of your shield in the first bite, your shoes suddenly felt insufficiently gripped to your feet.  When Bjarney stops to tie his own shoes, as well, well, ya never know what goes on inside a man’s head.  There’s a certain adjunctive excitement to confusion, but it’s a real head-scratcher for ethologists.

Good on you, Dad.  

Over at truthdig.com, Peter Scheer (Robert’s bro?) rails for lesser evilism:

Being an American citizen and having the right to vote-assuming your state hasn’t stolen that right through a felony charge, a voter ID law or a shifty election machine-is like having a golden ticket. The president of the United States is, for better or worse, the de facto emperor of the world, and you’re possibly one of a minority of people who gets to pick him.

[your enfeebled, minority rights to vote for “de facto emperor of the world” will not be wasted in this democracy…No, sir. ]

Voting isn’t simply a civic duty or a right; it’s a jackpot, one that corporations, political parties and perhaps the ruling elite are constantly trying to take away from you. The choices you make, and that includes the choice not to be involved, will decide where the bombs fall, where in the developing world the HIV drugs get distributed, how poor you have to be to get health care and whether someone whose life experience amounts to horse racing is put in charge of managing our government’s response to natural disasters.  

What a jackpot!  What a golden ticket!  You decide “where the bombs fall.”  

I identify with those progressives who say it is evil for President Obama to send robots across the night to bomb whole villages because someone’s name was added to a secret list we’ll never see. I think it is disgusting that a country that sings of the free and the brave would lock up and essentially torture Pvt. Bradley Manning for courageously defying the faceless imperial beast, as he is alleged to have done. President Obama has done many things in four years that make me grind my teeth.

Scheer leaves no clues as to whether this is vicious satire or not, but I admit to thinking the worst; so I’m climbing out of the interrogator’s window altogether while they freshen their coffee.