Tag: ideas

Read the article at HuffPo yesterday, got pissed and wrote something angry, then went to work. While at work I read some comments, though, admittedly, not all of them, and realized why so many people have a beef with HuffPo. I’m not trying to throw HuffPo under the bus, writing in anger leads to this, and I wrote in anger and put too much trust into a single source. Just because you are using a BIG NAME for a source doesn’t mean that source is right, they are just as likely to misinterpret something as you are. That is human. But there is a difference between misinterpreting and deliberately misconstruing, and since our political guard is always up about deception, and since many of us are partisans, we often frame things within our own pre-made narrative. All of these things I have been guilty of, but who among us can plead innocent among such charges?

More below the fold

Cannon Fodder

Function noun

Date: circa 1891

1  soldiers regarded or treated as expendable in every battle

2  an expendable or exploitable person, group, or thing

So today, late in the work day my boss says ‘Hey Brunemeyer, lets go.  We’re off to Monmouth County to push up a 30’.  This translated into driving to one of the wealthiest towns in the country to push ups a $2,000 flagpole, on a guys front lawn, in front of his brand new anitque looking 4000 sq ft summer home, a block from the ocean.

On the way back south to our humble base camp we got to discussing the state of affairs we face today.  Things like the, largest environmental disaster ever seen, the riots in Greece and Ice Land, Wall St. bailouts and ‘to big to fail’.  

I mentioned that I’d been listening to the Lord Ramage novels and the Richard Sharpe series on my blinky book reader and how the idea of Cannon Fodder hadn’t changed since the beginning of time.  We, and I’ll be liberal in thinking of anyone not of the ‘mover and shaker’ cast are nothing but cannon fodder.  1% give or take of humanity is and has always controlled the game.  The 99% remaining are nothing but Cannon Fodder.  We the ‘enlisted, drafted, enslaved, pressed’ are of no concern beyond our use as prostitutes consumers, borrowers, laborers, clarks willing of necessity to sell our minds bodies and souls to survive swindled and defrauded with the scam we call the American Dream.  “yep, you too can live the life of luxury and hedonistic over indulgence if ya work hard and do as we say”  

Now you may say  ‘not me, I have a degree, a good job, great future and who knows what all else but think about it.  Loose your job, get sick or have any sort of setback and see how fast all that secure future is real and how much is so much hype.  

It’s the same old tune, cyclical and unending,  I’d hoped we’d evolved to something better than our brutish past proved.  I’d thought maybe just maybe we’d learned at least in some small way that we’re all in it together but no I was delusional, drunk or stoned.  We are still a brutish species.  The revolutionary war in the U.S., the French Revolution, Russia, India, Iran, Cuba et al are but blips in the great theater of history.  The little men behind the curtain still play Svengali and we still march, bayonets at the ready, stocks on, hopes and patriotism swirling in our minds into the breach to die.  To play our parts, no more valuable than chits, or playing cards in the great game of life.

This is a different sort of diary from what I usually write.  

John B. Judis has an excellent article in The New republic entitled Tea Minus Zero in which he examines the socialogical basis of many Tea party adherents and the ideas that seem to animate their popularity.  While the Tea Party is used and sometimes directed by Big Business and the Republican Party, Judis suggests that those of us, inlcuding me at times, have been too simplistic in our analysis.  While I find his article extremely interesting, I think he undervalues the extent of white supremacy in forming the core ideology of Tea Party adherents.  I see many Tea Partiers to be ideological descendants of “The Democracy” of the Jacksonian era.  

Here is a key point before the fold: Most actual tea party folks are “marginal middle class” and they “look uneasily upward at corporate CEOs and investment bankers, and downward at low-wage service workers and laborers, many of whom are minorities. And their political outlook is defined by whether they primarily blame those below or above for the social and economic anxieties they feel.”

More after the fold.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

     Demand purity? “But that’s crazy talk!” you say.

     Of course it is! I’m not talking about purity for the Democrats, you sillies. I’m talking about purity for the Republican party.

    I demand MORE of it! MORE Republican purity is the BEST thing the Democratic party and the progressive movement could possibly hope for.

     There is NO possibility of recalling The Wing-nuts-          

     You see, there is no such thing as liberal purity. Put 100 random liberals in a room and you will have 100 different views of how the world should be.

     Conservatives, on the other hand . . . .

     More below the fold

Note:  This diary relies heavily on three brilliant videos from the TED conferences.  They’re a little longer than your average music video but they present what I consider to be some very important ideas as well as being very interesting and entertaining.  I urge you to watch them all in their entirety.  I think you’ll be pleased that you did.  Gracias.

Our entire improbable existence is the outcome of a long chain of bizarre circumstances, happenstances, accidents and experiments.  Human society has never been anything more than a jackleg improvised house of cards – the rise and fall of civilizations themselves something of a mirage in motion, houses of smoke and mirrors, patchwork quilts comprised of dreams, hallucinations, insight and insanity, traditions and superstitions.  We’ve been making it up as we went all along.  Human society is an organism unto itself and subject with any certainty only to natural laws.  It is understood poorly at best and nothing at all about it has ever been guaranteed.  As Lithium Cola says, “what made you think any of this was ever going to work out anyway?”

Quality, as it relates to journalism, and the inclusion of people like John Yoo and Doug Feith on the faculties of major universities

New diary: Hillary has a hidden strategy to win the general election

Talk about the electoral College.  Do some research to see how those electors are pledged.  Compare and contrast that with Hillary’s declared intentions about pledged delegates.

New diary: the fact is, not conspiracy, defeat Hillary

Discuss how the fact of Mark Penn’s work for Columbia, as opposed to the lie about old bomb is involvement with the Canadians, worked against her.  Similarly, discuss how the fact of her Bosnia sniper story proved to be so inconvenient; also, the story about NAFTA and North American Free Trade Agreement.  Also, the story that she opposed the Iraq war before old mama did.  Also, the fact of her fund-raising shortfalls.  Also, the fact of her poor decision-making surrounding her campaign, undercutting her “experience” and “judgment” strategies.

America will never be the same, nor will the world.

This is why we fight so hard to prevent tyranny. This is why so many millions or billions of humans have died fighting for freedom. This is why the American Revolution was fought, this is why the Founders worked so hard on a solution to tyranny.

Because as we have seen, as has been proved again…as if it needed to be ….destruction is SO much quicker ad easier than construction. It is easily accomplished by a small amount of people who are focussed upon it. So much has been wiped out or reversed in such a small amount of time. Decades of progress, and in the larger picture, centuries, of a slow building of the consensus of human beings on how human beings should conduct themselves.